Basel Social Clun 2026: Josh Rabineau, Alexander Shchurenkov and Pascale Birchler
The Fragment Gallery presentation at Basel Social Clun 2026 as a dialogue between Josh Rabineau and Alexander Shchurenkov, tracing how the office — often assumed to be neutral and functional — emerges as a charged site of fetish, discipline, and desire.
Rabineau’s sculpture operates at the point where attraction and revulsion collide. A familiar urinal drawn from public and office restrooms is reconstructed from casts of children’s playground toys shaped like small houses or toy beds. By fusing an object of bodily regulation and institutional control with symbols of childhood innocence and domestic fantasy, Rabineau exposes how normativity is learned, internalized, and fetishized. What initially reads as playful or benign gradually becomes unsettling: the aesthetics of fairy tales and playground architecture evoke early imagination and world-building, but also socialization, obedience, and latent anxiety. Positioned within the logic of the office, the urinal becomes a fetish object — one that quietly manages intimacy, discipline, and desire.
In After (Silk) (2024), Shchurenkov presents a polished, mirror-like steel panel fitted with a fixed doorknob, installed at the exact height of a standard office door. The reflective surface returns the viewer to the architecture of authority and routine, while the doorknob — designed to regulate access, privacy, and control — functions as the work’s psychological hinge. Draped loosely over it is a vintage Hermès silk tie with horse-harness motifs, an emblem of corporate power, submission, and domination. Informally tied, the tie reads as both evidence and aftermath, suggesting what has occurred — or may still be unfolding — behind the closed door.
Together, the works expose how workplace codes become eroticized, how discipline slides into desire, and how queer identity is often negotiated through concealment, ritual, and restraint. Collapsing binaries such as innocence and control, desire and disgust, visibility and repression, Rabineau and Shchurenkov reveal the office not as neutral infrastructure but as a psychological theater. Resisting polished narratives of queer visibility, Shchurenkov’s practice foregrounds quieter tensions of isolation, repression, and self-preservation — where intimacy is coded, desire is displaced, and the office becomes a charged site of projection and control.
Fragment is also delighted to present an important sculpture by Swiss artist Pascale Birchler.
In “Still Untitled (Noch ohne Titel),” Pascale Birchler transforms the office — a space typically associated with productivity, efficiency, and control — into a site of suspension and contradiction. Designed for work, these environments increasingly replace windows with screens and reduce bodies to standardized roles and routines. Here, however, time appears to have stalled.
A seated female figure rests motionless in an office chair, refusing the logic of activity that usually defines such spaces. Rather than performing labor, the sculpture embodies a moment of stillness, introspection, and withdrawal. Within this cool, impersonal environment, a different kind of presence emerges: a longing for nature, imagination, and forms of experience that lie beyond the demands of work.
Hand-stitched from silk, the figure's torso balances between vulnerability and artifice. At the neck, the fabric is left abruptly cut, exposing seams, stuffing, and the inner construction of the body. The gesture interrupts any illusion of wholeness or perfection, revealing the sculpture as a fragile assemblage. By placing this exposed, contemplative figure within the architecture of the office, Birchler highlights the tension between systems of productivity and the irreducible complexity of human experience.
Josh Rabineau (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is a recent graduate of the MFA program in Sculpture at Yale University (2026). His first solo exhibition was presented at Fragment Gallery, New York, in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Lauren Powell Projects (Los Angeles), Lubov (New York), and SPIELZEUG (New York), among others.
Alexander Shchurenkov (b. 1984, lives and works in New York, USA) graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2018. In 2017 and 2022, he received scholarships to participate in courses at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts ("What the Work Tells About the Tools" by Michael Beutler, 2017, and "Fragility and Resilience" by Anna Daučíková, 2022). In 2018, his first New York solo show, "Once it Happened, Backfired," was presented at Vacation Gallery (New York, USA). In March 2019, he took part in the High House artist residency (Norfolk, UK) under the mentorship of Antony Gormley. In 2021, he participated in the group exhibition "Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene" at the GARAGE Museum (Moscow, Russia). That same year, he also presented his project "Date with America" at NADA House (New York, USA). His second New York solo show opened at Fragment Gallery in January 2024.
Pascale Birchler (b. 1982, Zug, Switzerland) lives and works in Zurich. She studied Illustration at HAW Hamburg before completing her BA and MA in Fine Arts at HKB Bern. Birchler’s work has been presented internationally at venues including Kunsthalle Luzern, Istituto Svizzero in Rome, UCCA Edge in Shanghai, Museum Helmhaus in Zurich, Kunstmuseum Luzern, White Space in Beijing, and Kunsthaus Zug. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Kunsthalle Luzern (2024), Kunstverein Last Tango, Zurich (2024), Fragment Gallery, New York (2023), Kunstverein Friedrichshafen (2019), and Gallery Peter Kilchmann, Zurich (2021), as well as group exhibitions at Francesca Minini, Milan; MANIERA, Brussels; Gallery Continua, San Gimignano; Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza, as part of the Ducato Prize. In 2023–24, she was an artist-in-residence at ISCP in New York.
