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

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 (2025), Rūtė Merk stages an uncanny convergence between the overlooked one-euro coin and the ephemeral surface of milk foam for latte art, fusing economic symbolism with everyday rituals, orchestrating a visual entanglement of capital, image, and aesthetic labor. At its center, the one-euro coin—engraved with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—spins through fields of chromatic distortion. Once an emblem of Renaissance idealism and anthropocentric order, the figure now flickers as a ghost of proportion in an abstract system of value. The reference to da Vinci also evokes the entwined histories of courtly patronage and creative pursuit, where aesthetic production operated beyond the confines of material value—an offering to perfection. In this latest painting by Merk, the blurred surface of a coffee latte appears like a contemporary portal where consumption and performance converge in ritualized routine. Amid this swirling foam, Merk brings forth the questions around value, circulation, and the tenuous trust that scaffolds economic life. The painting pulses with a lathery surge of painterly textures, mimicking the liquidity of social cohesion in a hyper-mediated world. Currency, like the human figure suspended in da Vinci’s Vitruvian geometry, is shown to be both measure and mirage—caught in flux, shaped by hands unseen.

Rūtė Merk conjures a haunting cosmology in Euro Anatomy (2025), where historical ideals, corporeal fragility, and economic symbolism drift through a field of floral bloom and spectral remnants in a disparate orientation. Two golden one-euro coins—one bearing the figure of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—hover in uncanny suspension, rotating midair like celestial bodies. The Vitruvian Man, once a symbol of Renaissance humanism, appears estranged in this phantasmagoric tableau. Recast onto the back of a euro coin, the motif no longer anchors a coherent worldview but drifts through a system where the once-consensus ideals of unity and shared value dissolve beneath layers of abstraction, alienation, and division. In a cosmos unmoored from collective belief, power no longer radiates from empires or minted metals but flickers across networks, streaming data, and the volatile circuitry of digital desire. The coin—gilded yet hollow—spins within this altered gravity. Merk captures this ontological slippage with painterly precision, her surface undulating with spectral liquidity that mirrors the instability of value in a post-industrial age. Euro Anatomy reimagines a new equilibrium—one not bound by centralized authority or historical coherence, but emerging instead from fragmentation, and 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.