BANK is pleased to present the video work "Double Fly Rob Bank" (2009) by Double Fly Art Center in the 2025 edition of Basel Social Club, on view from Jun 15 to Jun 21. Stay tuned.
In 2009, the Chinese avant-garde art collective Double Fly Art Center performed an absurd "bank heist" that playfully deconstructed the capitalist system. In their seminal work Double Fly Robs the Bank, the artists rented a van, donned comical ski masks, and stormed into a bank under renovation. With exaggerated violent gestures, they "looted" the construction site before making off with building materials, leaving bewildered workers and security guards in their wake. This performance involved no actual criminal intent nor caused material damage, yet through its theatrical "capital plunder" imagery, it laid bare the complex symbiotic yet antagonistic relationship between art and capital.
This "robbery" was essentially a meticulously orchestrated semiotic revolt. By appropriating classic crime film tropes—masked bandits, speeding getaway vans, violent gestures—they pushed capitalist logic to absurd extremes: if capitalist society worships "accumulation by dispossession," then the artists would respond with even more blatant "looting." The stolen construction materials were transformed into "readymade art," their value no longer determined by the market but by the act's inherent provocation. This rebellious strategy echoes the Situationist International's concept of détournement—hijacking capitalism's script to expose its inherent fragility.
Sixteen years later, this work resurfaces at the highly suggestive Art Basel Social Club. Everyone understands that once absorbed into the exhibition mechanism, artistic actions risk becoming capital's value-added commodities. Yet Double Fly's cunning lies in maintaining their "heist" in perpetual incompletion—the looted materials never entered market circulation as "artworks" but disappeared into the artists' self-effacing gesture. This refusal to be priced perhaps hints at the ultimate paradox of artistic resistance: true rebellion may lie not in opposing capital, but in relentlessly mimicking it until capitalist logic collapses under the weight of its own reflection.
