I looked around, but I couldn’t quite pin down what the bunker was originally used for. An archive for the architects? An air-raid shelter? Fruit storage? A nightclub? All of these came up. None were clearly verified, though each somehow felt appropriate. Not that it really matters. What’s important is what it’s become: the unlikely, but fitting home of June Art Fair.
Housed in this Herzog & de Meuron–designed former bunker just steps from Messeplatz, June returned in 2025 with fifteen galleries from nine countries. The fair embraced transparency over territoriality, and conversation over commerce. It unfolded less like an art fair in the traditional sense and more like a well orchestrated artist space without the chaotic hang. All the gallerists seemed to be on the same side, the side of artists—and there was no air of tension or commercial competition. Everyone seemed to be working together.
Founded in 2019 by Christian Andersen (Copenhagen), June has remained gallery-led, tightly curated, and modest. Accessed via an industrial-sized lift or a small spiral stair, the space is defined by raw concrete walls and a spatial openness that resists the privatisation of attention so common to traditional fair architecture. There is a sense of permanence to the entire experience. Large art fairs often carry a material ephemerality: event halls and exposition centres with booths built from temporary plywood to mimic little white cubes. June dodges this feeling of disposability—it has an air of authenticity and permanence. As June returned for its seventh edition (16–22 June 2025), it reaffirmed a simple core premise: that intimacy and art are all you really need for an art fair.
All the work carried elements of intrigue. Parisa Kind presented a focused solo of Olaf Metzel; Lagune Ouest (Copenhagen) showed the sculptures of Kåre Frang. Patricia L. Boyd, shown by Christian Andersen, offered a restrained proposition. Her sculptural vitrines—a split pillow leaking duck feathers, glassware, and domestic fragments—echoed scientific display cases, though their purpose felt less archival than observational. The arrangement of objects invited close looking, not conclusion.
This year’s programming extended the fair’s ethos beyond the gallery presentations into a set of curated side projects. Among them was Structures of Support, a panel hosted by émergent and moderated by Mischa Lustin, one half of Galerina, London. The conversation brought together Christian Andersen, John Riepenhoff (The Green Gallery), and Tenko Nakajima (Tenko Presents) to discuss evolving models of gallery practice, artist-run initiatives, and the shifting definitions of emerging contemporary art spaces within—and beyond—the traditional system.
Elsewhere, People’s Soup—a collaboration between Tobias Kaspar and Li Zhenhua—hosted informal lunches that blurred the line between hospitality and curation. And The Garden Cinema, curated by PROVENCE, transformed a green corner of the site into a scavenger hunt of films nestled within a rigorously unkempt communal garden.
None of these elements asked to be centre stage. They didn’t frame themselves as “experiential” in the current parlance of branded activation. Instead, they subtly extended June’s investment in non-hierarchical forms of attention and shared time, resisting spectacl
What stands out about June is what it refuses. It doesn’t attempt to scale—limited, quite literally, by the walls of its bunker. It doesn’t chase visibility. And despite its proximity to Art Basel, it doesn’t define itself in opposition. June simply chooses another tempo, and sustains it. In a moment when fairs are under pressure to hybridise, digitise, and dramatise, June’s commitment to it's position doesn’t feel nostalgic—it feels deliberate.
In an ecosystem built on circulation and accumulation, June reminds us that not all presence needs to be amplified, and not all things of value need to be huge.
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Clara Bruni is a writer based between London and Barcelona.
