Basel Social Club 2025 - Press Release

Exhibitions

Basel Social Club
2025

Rūtė Merk
Ni Hao

Rittergasse 21–25
CH-4051 Basel

Dates_ June 15–21, 2025
Duration_ 2pm–midnight

Installation Views / Works / Press Release

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present the latest works of Rūtė Merk and Ni Hao in the fourth edition of Basel Social Club, on view from June 15 to 21, 2025, at a historic former private bank located in the heart of Basel, Switzerland. This year’s edition centers on the theme of “systems of value exchange”, with artworks responding to the symbolic site of the bank and its embedded histories of currency, power, and inequality. As in previous editions, the venue will be transformed into a series of immersive rooms—including a piano bar, cigar lounge, clock corridor, and erotic cabinet—that offers audiences a dynamic and unexpected journey through material and symbolic economies. The featured works investigate how the body, intimacy, and affective labor circulate through regimes of financial abstraction and fetishized exchange, offering timely reflections on how value is encoded, mediated, and redistributed across systems.

In Euro News, Rūtė Merk orchestrates an uncanny convergence between the overlooked one-euro coin and the ephemeral surface of latte milkfoam, staging a visual entanglement of capital, image, and aesthetic labor. The scene unfolds like a suspended mid-frame in a ceaseless news cycle: a Euro coin—engraved with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—dissolves into a swirl of neon-blue and acid-yellow pixels. The reference to da Vinci not only conjures ideals of anthropocentric harmony, but also the entwined histories of courtly patronage and creative pursuit, where aesthetic labor once served both symbolic and economic functions. Here Impressionistic brushstrokes adopted by Merk turn metal into liquid light and fracture the Renaissance figure into fragments, suggesting not proportion, but a spectral echo of balance within a system in flux. Behind this dissolving geometry, a lathery surge of painterly textures pulses with the hypnotic rhythm of caffeine-driven productivity—a contemporary portal where consumption and performance collapse into ritualized routine. In this work, currency—like the body suspended in da Vinci’s geometry—becomes both measure and mirage, circulating not as a stable anchor, but as an unstable signal shaped by hands unseen.

In Euro Anatomy, Rūtė Merk conjures a haunting cosmology where motifs of historical idealism, corporeal fragility, and economic symbolism drift across a field of spectral flora. Two sides of a one-euro coin—one inscribed with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—hover in uncanny suspension, rotating midair like celestial bodies. The human figure, once the embodiment of Renaissance harmony, now appears fractured and estranged, caught in a system where unity and shared value have dissolved into abstraction and division. Surrounding the coins, delicate botanical forms—chamomile, St. John’s Wort—flare and fade. Known for their healing and antidepressant properties, these plants offer a counterpoint to the metallic logic of capital, introducing an undercurrent of care and mortality. A ghostly ribcage emerges, X-ray-like, evoking a memento mori that sets vulnerable anatomy against minted sovereignty. Merk’s painterly surface oscillates between crisp precision and atmospheric dissolution, allowing value, nature, and death to coexist without collapsing into resolution. Power no longer radiates from empires or precious metals, but flickers across networks, data streams, and the volatile circuitry of digital desire. Euro Anatomy suspends us in this altered gravity—where health becomes currency, and equilibrium is not coherence, but the ambient rhythm of distributed systems.

In My Melody (2025), Ni Hao fuses geological time with affective residue to stage a meditation on intimacy, temporality, and mediated desire. The sculpture juxtaposes a pair of worn cotton socks—sourced from an anonymous seller via an online fetish marketplace—with a trilobite fossil and steel apparatus. The fossil, a relic of deep time, anchors the work in corporeal history, while the socks, still imbued with scent and softness, register a different kind of memory: recent, gendered, and transactional. Innocence and desire, intimacy and fetish, the ephemeral and the eternal converge in this unlikely pairing, drawing a fragile continuum between bodily trace and geological imprint. On screen, the seller performs the removal of her socks in a public park—an act at once casual and ritualized. Through this anonymous documentation, Ni Hao choreographs a porous economy of visibility, where touch becomes relic, labor becomes signal, and the fetish is both archive and currency.

Lovers II (Yieldpoint) (2025) captures a moment of shared intimacy rerouted through performance, fetish, and transactional image. Two worn polyester socks, their tie-dye patterns faded with use, are suspended in a structure of rusted steel and hardened resin. Purchased from a gay couple via an anonymous online exchange, the socks become tokens of relational affect—sweat, movement, and intimacy imprinted in their fibers. In the accompanying video, the couple undresses each other’s feet with playful tenderness at a gym, staging the erotic not as spectacle but as coded labor. Ni Hao transforms the act into a ritual of mutual display and mediated affection, questioning where touch begins and ownership ends. Here, affection is framed, choreographed, and distributed—offered as a gift, archived as evidence, and circulated as value.