Agenda

The 75th anniversary of the Basler puppet theatre, founded in 1944 by Richard Koelner (1904-1993), is the occasion for a small presentation. Since its move to the Zehntenkeller on the Münsterplatz in 1956, it has become the first puppet theatre in Basel with regular performances. The presentation shows puppets in the context of old performances and presents music from old performances classical or contemporary. To this day, music still plays an important role in this theatre, as it were an opera with puppets.

What the photographer Daniel Schwartz (1955) has been concentrating on for many years could be called glaciology in images. His work is a multidisciplinary project of photographic art in documentary style. As a photographer Daniel Schwartz examines the visual power of glaciers. He substantiates his pictorial work by research in archives, and works in close dialogue with science. His images show the glacier as a dynamic system and as an archive of climate history, as a personal place of remembrance and reservoir of resources, which are neither unlimited nor indefinitely available.

In a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre that represents the key phases of her artistic career, Swiss artist Miriam Cahn shows vibrant works on paper, oil paintings, monumental sculptures, performative videos, and sketchbooks. The latter have never been on view to the general public before and have been assembled in a chronology and in a thematically expansive installation. In it the artist reinterprets the classical museum building as a sensual, conceptual construction while illustrating the artist‘s principles in regard to meaning, motifs, and aesthetics. Many works have been created especially for the exhibition or are key works in the possession of the artist.

For more than forty years, the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich has held the Tibetan collections of Austrian mountaineers Heinrich Harrer (1912-2006) and Peter Aufschnaiter (1899-1973) and the expedition collections of Heinrich Harrer from the 1960s. On 17 May 1944 they reached the Tibetan plateau. Seven years later they left the city of Lhasa, each with its own collection of ethnographic everyday and ritual objects, numerous black and white photographs, hand-drawn maps and sketches, and hundreds of pages of diary entries and notes. For the first time, this exhibition establishes a link between these collections. This offers the opportunity to understand Harrer and Aufschnaiter as actors in specific historical constellations, embedded in networks of different relationships, and as a shortened cultural-historical map of Tibet.

Tiffany Chung excavates in ruins and urban waste to reveal objects. The objects that Chung encounters in her archaeological research aren’t necessarily exceptional things. They are rather trivial witnesses of an everyday and bygone life, which still resonates within the objects. Thủ Thiêm, an old city quarter of Saigon (Vietnam), was once a lively quarter, which was overwritten with a master plan of the urban space, an exhaustive transformation which leaves nothing as it was before and destroys the social structures.  This master plan is a tabula rasa and effaces history. This is met by the artist with a different plan: an artistic cartography which captures the spiritual and historical dimensions of a place.

Glaciers, densely populated by seals, endless Sahara dunes or mist-covered mountains in the Amazon rainforest: Sebastião Salgado (1944) depicts the earth as a creation of overwhelming beauty and thus sharpens our awareness of its preciousness. Salgado has sailed across oceans, scaled mountains, and crossed deserts. He has observed animals and met indigenous peoples in his endeavor to capture their environment and culture. The exhibition is a manifesto that not only touches visitors with black-and-white photographs, but also raises open questions about how we deal with the planet.

Artists of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries devise unusual ways to integrate writing into their works. Fascinated by the shapes of the letters, they create alphabets in which the bodies of humans and animals stand in for the strokes of the pen. Dialogues, legends, and titles on banderoles bring images to life and help the beholder make sense of them. These elements appear in portraits and depictions of biblical scenes, but also in illustrations of historic events. The exhibition showcases selected eminent works from the Kupferstichkabinett to shed light on the multifaceted interplay between writing and image.

Bob Brown (1886-1959) was convinced in the early 1930s: “Books are antiquated word containers” – and although he was already of the opinion at the time that books were outdated, the prophecies of the death of the medium have not been fulfilled to this day. Again and again, artists expand our idea of what can still be considered a book. Must it be bound? Printed? Consist of paper?

Cyprien Gaillard (1980 ) describes and evokes the perpetual destruction, preservation, and reconstruction of urban spaces with films, photographs, and sculptures, His works capture the incessant transformation of the urban landscape, as well as that of nature and humankind. Gaillard stresses that construction and destruction are not contradictory concepts, they are two sides of the same process. In order to erect new buildings, it is necessary to accept the disappearance of what already exists, be it a landscape, another building or no-man’sland. The construction of the new always involves the destruction of what went before.

 

At the age of just twenty, Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) was already engaged in a search for new themes and forms of expression. One artistic revolution followed another, in a rapid succession of changing styles and visual worlds. The forthcoming exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler places the focus on the Blue and Rose periods (1901-1906), and on a central phase in Picasso’s work. It also sheds fresh light on the emergence, from 1907 onward, of Cubism, as an epochal new movement that was nevertheless rooted in the art of the preceding period.