Basel Social Club returns for its fifth edition, transforming a vacant multi-story office building in central Basel into a temporary social stage for art during Art Basel week. This year’s edition, titled “Office” reconsiders the venue not as a site of production, but as a space for reflection. Once a symbol of efficiency and growth, the office today reflects shifting realities shaped by digitalization, remote work, and artificial intelligence. Basel Social Club engages this condition through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters that explore questions of labor, time, productivity, and rest.

This year we propose a two-person presentation that reads the office as an atmospheric machine: a place that regulates light, attention, posture, tempo - the soft coercions of productivity. Our project builds on the fair’s vertical journey, entering through the underground garage before rising into office levels - by aligning two conflicting vantage points: the basement and the rooftop. 

London’s financial skyline is brought into Basel as weather, sound and rhythm; meanwhile the office interior is rendered uncanny and strangely tender. Together, the works ask: “What remains of “work” when the office is hollowed out; when its infrastructure persists but its purpose slips?”

Thomas P. Grogan’s wall-based sound sculptures translate iconic towers into resonant housings that emit rooftop field recordings. Each work functions like a miniature façade and a duct at once; an architectural organ that breathes. A light sensor modulates volume: as ambient light intensifies, the sound rises, producing a circadian arc across the day. In the context of The Office, these sculptures operate as an anti-productivity clock. They refuse the steady, managerial cadence of the workday and instead align the room with weather, glare, dusk and drift. An ecology of attention rather than a schedule of tasks.

David Micheaud’s paintings depict everyday thresholds - an intercom, a budget hotel room, a leaf shadow at dusk - as images of “the familiar rendered strange.” Drawing from the unhomely (Unheimlich) and its contemporary readings, the works hold a quiet tension between comfort and containment. Interiors that are immaculate yet slightly disquieting, spaces of rest that resemble waiting rooms; domestic surrogates for the outside. Running through them is a persistent longing for exteriority - for air, horizon, weather - felt most acutely when one is enclosed by systems of work. Nature appears not as landscape but as proxy. This substitution is never resolved; it returns in loops, like a screensaver for the nervous system - an attempt to keep “outside” present through repeated low-grade simulation. In an era of home offices, platform labour and constant availability, these paintings picture the psychological afterimage of work. The way the office migrates into private life and the way the outdoors is reconstructed indoors through décor, screens, plants and horizon-like compositions.

In dialogue, Grogan’s works extend this same impulse into time and sound: rooftop recordings and light-reactive volume bring the city’s exterior conditions into the room as a circadian, atmospheric pulse - an engineered “outside” that waxes and wanes with illumination, replacing the office clock with weather.

All enquiries to info@xxijrahii.net 

Access to Basel Social Club is free of charge and open to all.

Entrances
Main entrance: Erdbeergraben 1, 4051 Basel
Sun 14 June: 2 PM – 3 AM
Mon 15 – Sat 20 June: 4 PM – 3 AM

Also accessible via: Viaduktstrasse 33–35, 4051 Basel
Entrance open until 10 PM daily

Both entrances are wheelchair accessible.

By tram (recommended)
Tram 6 → exit Heuwaage → Erdbeergraben (main entrance)
Tram 2 → exit Markthalle → Viaduktstrasse

By train
Basel Social Club is within a short walking distance of Basel SBB station.

By taxi
Drop-off at Erdbeergraben 1 (main entrance)