Basel Social Club - Press Release

Fairs

Basel Social Club

Office

Anna Gonzalez Noguchi
Sydney Shen
Ye Yi

Dates_ June 14–20, 2026
Venue_ Erdbeergraben 1, 4051 Basel

Installation Views / Works / Press Release

We’re pleased to participate in Basel Social Club 2026: Office, on view June 14–20 in Basel. This year’s edition occupies a vacant office building near Basel SBB, activating its floors through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters. Positioning the office as both subject and scenography, Basel Social Club engages with evolving conditions of work, time, and production in the context of digitalization, remote infrastructures, and artificial intelligence. We look forward to contributing to this site-responsive program and to welcoming you in Basel.

Gallery Vacancy’s presentation brings together Anna Gonzalez Noguchi, Sydney Shen, and Ye Yi, whose works approach the office not simply as a place of labor, but as a system of surfaces, routines, instruments, and suspended expectations. Across stationery, business-card holders, promotional pencils, and ceiling grids, the selected works trace how administrative structures seep into psychic and material life, transforming familiar tools into sites of devotion, speculation, delay, and uneasy play.

Paris-based Chinese artist Ye Yi takes functional space as the point of departure for his sculptural and installation practice, focusing on how specific emotional states crystallize within regulated environments. His recent research centers on the office as a highly rationalized and standardized space. Within this context, he approaches melancholy as a state of dislocation produced by rational structures themselves: action is suspended, while thought and affect continue to intensify and circulate.

For Basel Social Club 2026, Ye presents When shall we three meet again (2026), an installation that reconfigures the suspended grid ceiling system commonly found in modern offices. Industrial panels are replaced by leather reliefs, while aluminum grids and flickering ceiling lights tilt the architecture into an unstable stage. Three ravens hover within the structure; the title borrows from the opening line of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, spoken by the First Witch, and introduces a prophetic temporality in which the future feels less open than endlessly rehearsed. The birds remain neither taking off nor landing, circling a moment that is continually deferred. Against the standardized logic of the office ceiling, their animal presence and the faltering light reveal a slower form of violence: one that does not erupt, but gradually reorganizes action, attention, and the body’s capacity to move.

Sydney Shen’s sculptures and installations construct seductive yet unsettling worlds in which ordinary objects, bodily vulnerability, and speculative systems of display become unstable. Within her ongoing pencil sculptures, a familiar writing tool is enlarged into an outmoded promotional object for fictional companies. The works extend Shen’s interest in the ambiguity between function and fiction: the pencils remain technically able to write, yet at monumental scale they become props, souvenirs, advertisements, and worldbuilding devices. The textual elements embedded in these works operate as prose-poetic fragments and clues to what the artist has drolly called the “company town where [her] sculptures live.”

Calamity Twire Amusements (2022) takes the form of a giant promotional pencil advertising an imagined company. Made from cedar wood, graphite, acrylic, 22.7k gold leaf, PLA resin, nylon flocking fiber, and a steel mount, the sculpture is topped with a decorative flocked teddy bear and fabricated with a hand-sharpened graphite tip. It therefore retains the possibility of writing, while its enlarged body becomes a suspended object difficult to operate. The gilded text “Calamity Twire Amusements” does not carry a fixed meaning; in Shen’s notes, its sing-song rhythm evokes the imagined language of the “Wild West.” The word “Calamity” invokes the figure of Calamity Jane—the legendary sharpshooter and frontierswoman—connecting the work to the enduring cultural mythology of the American West. “Twire” is an archaic word; and “amusements” suggests an amusement-ride company. The decorative heavy serif lettering further recalls wanted posters and playbills from the popular imagination of the American West. This imagined company specializes in building “mine train coasters,” a familiar theme-park ride that, for Shen, points to the persistence of Wild West imagery and the technologies associated with that era within contemporary cultural fantasy.

The phrase “Fifth Dimension Locomotion” embossed on the work expands this fictional amusement company into a speculative ride system. Shen begins from the logic of 4D rollercoasters, in which the car spins while moving along the track, and imagines a “fifth dimension” rollercoaster that moves not only through space, but also through time. The word “locomotion” names movement in general, while also carrying a popular association with trains; paired with the archaic flavor of “twire,” it folds the language of rail travel, theme-park engineering, and time travel into a single fictional slogan. Presented in the context of an office, Shen’s pencil becomes both tool and advertisement: an enlarged writing instrument whose promotional language turns workplace utility toward fantasy, risk, and suspended movement.

Anna Gonzalez Noguchi’s sculptural practice examines the layered intersections of memory, material, and cultural identity, shaped by her Spanish and Japanese heritage and by a family archive inherited from her Japanese grandparents. Her works bring together machine-produced objects, hand-worked surfaces, found images, and personal objects, allowing household, work-related, and devotional materials to enter a shared grammar. In these clinically composed assemblages, familial traces are neither preserved as stable relics nor translated into direct autobiography; instead, they become part of a system through which memory is handled, revised, and partially withheld.

At Basel Social Club, Gonzalez Noguchi presents a group of small-scale works from her ongoing Kamidana series, titled after the Japanese term for “god shelf,” a miniature altar often found in homes and businesses. Office stationery, business-card holders, pencils, keys, pins, slides, and folded aluminum surfaces are recast as offerings and carriers of fragile order. A drafting pencil engraved with her grandmother’s name recalls the workplace habit of marking identical tools to prevent confusion; as dementia unsettles recognition, the inscription shifts from a practical label into a tender and uncertain trace. Orchid names, garden-magazine cuttings, dates, abbreviations, and recurring asterisks move across the works as annotations to obscured relations and unfinished stories. Their palm-scaled structures suggest a quiet cross-generational collaboration, where care, classification, and office routine converge in a delicate economy of placement and return.