Basel Social Club 2026 / Office
JUBG presents Lizzi Bougatsos, Georg Gatsas,
Illicit Bookshop (Costanza Candeloro & Francesca Ciccone),
Kembra Pfahler, Tobias Spichtig
+ 2 Vinyl Releases by I.U.D. and Tobias Spichtig
+ Tobias Spichtig live on Sunday, June 14, 2026 / 8 pm
Opening / June 14, 2026 / 2 pm – 3 am
On view / June 15 – 20, 2026 / 4 pm – 3 am
Basel Social Club
Erdbeergraben 1
4051 Basel
Switzerland
Basel Social Club, Basel
“Truly, Madly, Deeply” is a song by I.U.D., the duo of Lizzi Bougatsos and Sadie Laska. Its components are familiar: a strolling bassline, major chords on the piano, a profession of love. But it sure doesn’t add up to a familiar song. Sounds appear at the wrong speeds, salvaged from underwater or overprocessed by a faulty tape machine. It’s the great thing about a song, we can hear them all day, hundreds of them, and still be caught off guard. Still get disoriented. Still get led somewhere new.
What does a song say to a photograph? In 2007, Georg Gatsas took a photo of Lizzi Bougatsos performing with her band Gang Gang Dance. Performance photography, especially band photography, has a lot of conventions: catch the singer in midair, the guitar player doing the big kick, the drummer with both arms raised. Georg’s portrait of Lizzi does none of this. No clenched fists, no explosive action: Lizzi is serene. Unyielding. Georg finds her mid-summoning, letting in something sacred, something unutterable. Look, anyone can conjure a ghost on a hillside or in a forest. Lizzi’s ability to shrug off the stage—the cables and tangles and boxes and stands—to call in this spirit is unique. But so is Georg’s ability to find it. To leave in all the dumb service objects and show the portal opening despite. It’s a photo made as much through listening as through seeing, Georg trusting the unfamiliar and disorienting tones in Gang Gang’s music with the same faith as his careful eye.
What does a photograph say to a drawing? Georg took a photo of Kembra Pfahler in her red dress with her red lips in her red home, eyes wide despite the sunbeam slashed across her face. Every time I see it I blink and blink, rub my eyes, try to shake off the afterimage of the light, even though it’s her face, not mine. Kembra’s directness, her rigor, her marriage of malice and fun is apparent here. It’s also all apparent in her drawings, the bright aliens in their thigh-high boots, the hair ribbons, the stares undiminished by the sun. Many of these figures hold hands, a chain of connection that speaks both to camaraderie and to power being summoned. These figures are a kind of femlin, a creature originally created for Playboymagazine. In 1955, Hugh Hefner hired commercial illustrator LeRoy Neiman to create a motif for the magazine’s joke pages. Naked, booted, about the height of a champagne bottle, Neiman’s creation—the femlin—combines “female” and “gremlin” in both its name and attitude. A kind of endpoint for the magazine’s take on women: laid bare and vulnerable but somehow unknowable and dangerous too. Just as the pink nipples and cocked hip of a centerfold led to the perky trouble of the femlin, Kembra’s everyday bearing, so clear in Georg’s portrait, is distilled to the ferocity and glee of her drawings.
And what does a painting say to a song? I once told a curator about the artist Joe Lewis, who’d told me he always intended to be a painter but couldn’t stand all the time alone and started making performances instead. She replied that she believes painters work harder than other artists. That painting demands so much studio time, so much attention at the surface level, an attention that can only happen in the studio. Neither of us left that conversation inspired. Tobias Spichtig reframes this notion, describing painting as an act of adoration, of staying close. Could a painter justify the time and attention otherwise? You can look at Tobias’s painting Singer in Stage and understand this immediately. You can also see Tobias perform at Basel Social Club on Sunday, June 14, a singer on a stage. It is a chance to be in a room with friends, to gather. To hear Tobias sing Patsy Cline’s hit “Crazy” and wonder at the feeling in his delivery of the lines “I’m crazy/Crazy for feeling so lonely.”
So for the fifth edition of Basel Social Club, JUBG and Georg Gatsas present this web of paintings, photographs, books, drawings, and song. Presenting Georg’s portraits of artists alongside their works is a simple enough idea, but the intention isn’t to say “here’s a thing and here’s the person who made it.” The intention is to show how all these ways of making, of adoring, of summoning are interwoven. How sexuality and spirituality and queerness are all bound up in interaction and exchange. How these encounters must catch us off guard, must lead us somewhere new. How this all must be done the same way: Truly, madly, and deeply.
Ethan Swan, Rochester, New York, June 2026