Zürich Biennial

With Osama Alrayyan, Tolia Astakhishvili, James Bantone, Juan Barcia Mas & Shen He (Sexkino), Mark Barker, Sarah Benslimane, Vittorio Brodmann, Matt Browning, Centre D’Editions Melbourne, Tornike Chapodze, Anjesa Dellova, Nathalie du Pasquier, Cédric Eisenring, FitArt App, Madge Gill, Renee Gladman, Rafik Greiss, Raphael Hefti, Hardy Hill, Lonnie Holley, David Hominal, Brook Hsu, Shamiran Istifan, Lisa Jo, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Shuang Li, Lorenza Longhi, Danny McDonald, Jasper Marsalis, Alexandra Metcalf, Daniel Moldoveanu, Sveta Mordovskaya, Maurice Morel, Marianne Mueller, Jonathan Okoronkwo, Juan Antonio Olivares, Margit Palme, Cora Pongracz, Sophie Reinhold, Frode Felipe Schjelderup, Leopold Strobl, Kelly Tissot, Cassidy Toner, Ilaria Vinci, Dena Yago and Bruno Zhu.

The act of organising exhibitions, at its heart, is one of discovery and sharing. We share with an unknown audience; we share artists and individual artworks that we believe are thought provoking, and may be beautiful. We share with the belief that those works might have the same effect on others.

From the start, this was an exhibition whose theme and reason to be was art. We live in a moment in which it seems as if the only option for group exhibitions is the thematic exhibition. This is false, and minimises the visual and conceptual impact of what is exhibited. Art is enough in its ambiguous anythingness. Art is not just a symptom.

What happens when you look at art? When you select works you are drawn to? When you try to understand an artist’s art making? You expect to end up with an arbitrary selection, but this is an illusion. You end up with a collection of voices that talk to you about the world in which we live. You discover a potential exhibition and choose a generic title like “Zurich Biennial” to keep the voices independent, so that they can stand on their own two feet.

Many options for the presentation of art are represented: some works are new productions created for the exhibition; others are existing works recontextualised here; there are historical works expressing a current vitality; and new works direct from the artists’ studios. This is a diverse and international collection of works framed by the place, the institution and the city in which it is exhibited. It is a biennial, across only 500 square meters and a single room, reaching, as biennials do, around the world; it is a small, disparate fraction of the thrilling work across many media existing around us.

Yet, there is (at least) one common thing. We call it “windschief,” or, to use a literal translation, warped by the wind. Many of the works in this exhibition use the language of exaggeration, the grotesque and caricature. They use a language of abrasion, both optimistic in its humour and pessimistic about the state of things. This shouldn’t come as a surprise in a time obsessed with exposure, perfection, control and fear. The grotesque offers a way out, the exaggeration allows one to say “un-things” while signaling self-awareness; caricature is a place of oblique truth and humour. Through a variety of media, the artists here mirror our world, telling the truth, but telling it slant, like Emily Dickinson urged. Architecture in particular is stripped of its practical roots throughout the show, in a variety of ways becoming aesthetic and sculptural, shaping one’s movement as it is made redundant and non-functional. All these tropes seem appropriate in a time like ours.

The exhibition is curated by Mitchell Anderson, artist and founder of Plymouth Rock, and Daniel Baumann, director of Kunsthalle Zürich.

Kunsthalle Zürich x WAVES: Künstler:innen On Artists
In the context of the Zürich Biennale, and in anticipation of the forthcoming call-out for the studio programme WAVES, Kunsthalle Zürich invites you to a series of talks in January, February and March 2024.  Hear individual artists, selected from both the Biennale and WAVES collaborators, discussing another living artist whose work has proved significant for their thinking. These evening events will take place at the bar and are organised in collaboration with the initiators of the WAVES project,  Leila Peacock and Izidora I LETHE. Please check the Kunsthalle Zürich agenda for details.