Agenda

The idea of Utopia thrives particularly well in times of crises. The exhibition explores this phenomenon. Future visions for a better world usually emerge during a crisis.

There are scores of other examples from history of utopias and visions of the future that emerged during times of crises.

The coronavirus pandemic is the most profound seismic shift since World War II. So it’s no surprise that all kinds of interpretations and blueprints for the future are being thrown about. The exhibition (Virus – Crisis – Utopia) spins together some of the past and future threads.

A look back shows how vast the breadth of utopian thinking has always been.

Some Utopias turned out to be prophetic visions with a high level of realistic possibility, others were purely fantasies.

This is also the case with today’s (post) coronavirus utopias. The spectrum ranges from the meaningful and ingenious, to the totally warped. But which is which?

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) was a pioneer of abstraction. She devised a form of abstraction brought to life by her craftsmanship.

Her oeuvre encompasses textile pieces, a puppet theater, costumes, murals, furniture, architecture, graphic designs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, and reliefs.

Long after she first discovered dance as an expressive register in the orbit of Dada (zurich 1916), the lively interplay of equilibrium and motion remained a key feature of her art.

The exhibition ‘Living Abstraction’ (Gelebte Abstraktion) is organised in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate in London.

One of the many unanswered questions in art is the one relating to its origins. The discovery of Palaeolithic cave paintings towards the end of the 19th century radically changed views concerning the beginnings of art.

The exhibition (Art of Prehistoric Times – Rock Paintings from the Frobenius Expeditions) presents a number of these paintings.

The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1877-1938) and his team copied prehistoric rock art in the first half of the twentieth century.

On show are around 120 copies of original paintings, some of them several metres long, produced by Frobenius’ team of artists between 1913 and the 1950s.

The exhibition also looks at the impact that the rock paintings (that means their copies) had on modern art.