SOPHIE JUNG | BASEL SOCIAL CLUB 2025 Sophie Jung’s presentation at Basel Social Club parades around systems of scavenged contexts as carnivalesque exclamations of unmistakable urgency. Rejects of the system stripped naked of their givenness are simultaneously dignified and degraded by the sculptural infinitive; to fashion, to fix, to wedge, to ram, to project, to thrust disparate fragments into forced cross-material cooperation coerces the ejected into obscene tableaux vivants of animated objectification. In a physicalized continuation of ecriture feminine (the textual poesis which has characterized her performance practice for over a decade) Jung engages in a gestural transfiguration of post-modern detritus. Her hand turns “to lean” into the bearer of dejected emaciation; “to tie,” the cruciform, stigmata; “to jam,” the recto-verso, slapstick re-representations of autobiographical sovereignty; all-the-while collapsing into a fluidity of poetic plurality that leaks just enough to be flagged with the Wahrnzeichen: “ERROR.” Their sculptural holes provoke explanation and are pried open for consideration, hollowed out, devoured to the marrow. They frustrate statements as much as they have stakes in frustration. They gyrate with syntactic destabilization that unleashes a histor- ical scaffolding of rivalrous duos, a combative codependency masquerading as a false hero’s journey of mutual exclusivity. Every shift, flip, inversion, inside-outing, and upside-downing of this projected battle digs deeper into the contours of each assemblage, carving into surrounding contexts and reinforcing their physicality. Each sculpture puppeteers the carving out of the puppet theater of their own exploitation, queering the suffocation of statements with an exhibitionist presence that screams “I am their.” The heir of your interpretation, of your desire for interpretation, the mimesis of the desire for desiring interpretation: the Object. In their pious acceptance of the interpretive whip, they submit to and scandalize Objectivity. They stand as anti-monuments to the nonsensical, to cruelty, to learned helplessness, to captivity, to the syntax of survival misread as structure. In doing so, they transmute passive material into an active resistance: not a call to order, but a call to rupture.