Dorothy’s Office (2026) - Basel Social Club (ArtBasel 2026)

Galerie Fabian Lang

“Introducing oneself as a “Friend of Dorothy” has been one of the many secret codes used by the LGBTQIA+ community to discreetly share one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity in times of segregation. In 1981, when it was still illegal to be gay in the U.S. military, the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) in Chicago heard about this expression being used among servicemen and launched an investigation to identify and apprehend “Dorothy,” believing her to be a real person at the center of a vast homosexual network. The authorities hoped that finding Dorothy would allow them to uncover the names of all her gay friends.

Dorothy’s Office is a room extracted from The House of Dorothy (2023–2026), an ongoing immersive installation imagining the secret home of the community’s fictional best friend. Through a series of interconnected rooms, the project pays homage to queer spaces, histories, and strategies of survival from around the world. Taking the form of a surreal surveillance office, this chapter explores the mechanisms of observation, identification, and categorization that have historically been used to police queer lives. Cameras monitor the outside world, a filing cabinet contains the traces of the investigation, and everyday objects are subtly transformed, blurring the boundaries between domesticity and control. Playing with the paradoxes of visibility and concealment, the office questions who watches whom, and what it means to live under the constant awareness of being seen.”