SOPHIE JUNG | BASEL SOCIAL CLUB 2025 THEN SAID I, “WHO ART THOU?” “I AM,” QUOTH HE, “POEMANDER, THE MIND OF THE GREAT LORD, THE MOST MIGHTY AND ABSOLUTE EMPEROR: I KNOW WHAT THOU WOULDEST HAVE, AND I AM ALWAYS PRESENT WITH THEE.” Sophie Jung works across text, sculpture and performance, navigating the politics of re/re/representation and challenging the selective silencing that happens by concluding. She employs humor, shame, the absurd, raw anger, rhythm and rhyme, slapstick, hardship, friendship and a constant stream of slippages. Her sculptural work consists of bodies made up of both found and haphazardly produced attributes and defines itself against the dogma of an Original Idea or a Universal Significance. Instead it stands as a network of abiding incompletion, an ever changing choir of urgencies and pleasures, traumas and manifestations that communally relay between dominant and minor themes. She’s invested in triggering a de-categorizing of concepts and a de-conceptualization of categories, hopes for unholy alliances, cross-material solidarity and assemblages that defy resolution. Her approach to “stuff”—both legible utensil and metaphoric apparition sits somewhere between materialist responsibility and wild becoming. Jung received her BFA from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and her MFA from Goldsmiths, London. Recent exhibitions include Sanetroyem at E.A.Shared Space, They Might Stay The Night at Casino Luxembourg; Unsetting at Istituto Svizzero, Milan; Taxpayer’s Money for Frieze LIVE, Dramatis Personae at JOAN, LA; The Bigger Sleep at Kunstmuseum Basel; Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water at Blain Southern, London; Producing My Credentials at Kunstraum London; Paramount VS Tantamount at Kunsthalle Basel and Apparat at Ballroom Marfa. In 2016 and in 2019 she won the Swiss Art Awards and in 2018 she was the recipient of the Manor Kunstpreis. From 2016 to 2019 she was on the jury of the Swiss Performance Art Award and is a new member to the board of Kunsthalle Basel. She is an external mentor at Institute for Art, Gender and Nature at HGK Basel and has a Lehrauftrag for Performance at Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Karlsruhe. In 2015 Jung won a 6 month scholarship at ISCP in New York, and will in 2022/2023 be in residence at the Istituto Svizzero Roma in 2022/23. She is currently working on a solo exhibition at Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris and her first monograph with Mousse Publishing.