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The Future-Facing Institutional Exhibitions Not to Miss in Basel

This year’s strongest Art Basel-adjacent shows are asking big questions about our future, with artists using digital worlds, living systems, petrochemicals, machines and ritual to consider what might come next.

The OG Art Basel remains the most business-minded edition of the fair's ever-expanding global portfolio and the one least inclined to let you forget why everyone is there. Basel, Switzerland, after all, is not Miami Beach, Paris or Hong Kong. The city offers fewer distractions from the main event, and despite the constellation of satellite fairs and offsite programs that has grown up around the main fair, most of the oxygen still flows toward the Messeplatz.

This year, June Art Fair appears absent from that orbit, with no 2026 updates posted as of publication. Liste, meanwhile, returns as the essential satellite for emerging galleries, younger artists and discoveries, while Basel Social Club, now in its fifth edition, offers an even more casual counterpoint, with its no-booth, social gathering format staged inside a vacant multi-story office building. It also has the advantage of being the week's de facto after-hours headquarters, open until 3 a.m. with parties, drinks and DJ sets.

Still, Basel is worth returning to year over year in part because of the city's first-rate institutions and museums—37 of them, which is an absurdly high number for a city of its size. This year, you'll find exhibitions of artists working in speculative, experimental realms and engaging with technology to imagine alternative futures at the center of Basel's institutional programming. (The emphasis on tech and the digital world aligns neatly with Art Basel's digital sector, Zero 10, which makes its Basel debut next week after headline-generating editions in Miami and Hong Kong, curated by Eli Shein with art/tech pioneer Trevor Paglen.) Here are our picks for the shows to add to your Basel itinerary: 

Six must-see museum shows in Basel

Cao Fei's "Testimonies to the Near Future"

"New Rituals [for the End of the World]"

Monira Al Qadiri's "BENZENE FLOAT"

Shuang Li's "Alliance"

"Laboring Bodies" and Nicolas Darrot's "Fuzzy Logic"

Cao Fei's "Testimonies to the Near Future"

Kunstmuseum Basel; through October 11, 2026

The largest European survey of pioneering Chinese digital artist Cao Fei, "Testimonies to the Near Future" transforms the museum's Gegenwart building into an alternative virtual city that brings together three decades of the artist's expansive worldbuilding across installations, films, virtual worlds and game-based works.........

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