Class is the subject the art world prefers not to name. That is the starting point for a two-day symposium in Basel on 12 and 13 November 2026, where artists, theorists, filmmakers, curators, writers and performers will examine how class disappears from discussions of contemporary art even as it shapes how art is made, shown and sold. The event, titled The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure, takes place at the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, is free to attend, and will also be streamed online.

The organisers argue that precarity is freely discussed in abstract terms while the structural facts behind it are avoided: stagnant wages, the dismantling of welfare protections won by twentieth-century labour movements, and the way class cuts across race, gender and geography. Freelance fragmentation and the isolation of cultural workers into individual performers make collective bargaining harder, they say, and the symposium asks what is lost when art's language becomes the language of a wealthy few.

The programme, curated by Chus Martinez and Quinn Latimer, mixes talks, film and performance. Ana Teixeira Pinto will consider what happens when paid work stops anchoring the social contract, Ali Hussein Al-Adawy presents his film project Labor Images, and Doreen Mende revisits two early-1980s films shaped by Cold War ideas about class. James Richards and Yarema Malashchuk will discuss their own moving-image work, and performers Angharad Williams and Noa and Lara Castro Lema take up the realities of the social contract on stage.

Two curators will look back at earlier exhibitions that put class at the centre. Tirdad Zolghadr returns to Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, first staged in 2006 and recently reprised at de Appel in Amsterdam, which asked how class structures govern the production and reception of art. Maurin Dietrich revisits Not Working, her 2020 show at Kunstverein Munchen, and the history of the kunstverein as an institution invented for an emerging bourgeoisie. The symposium continues a series on gender and equality in the arts that Martinez and Latimer have run since 2018, and is dedicated to the memory of labour organiser Dolores Huerta.