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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

From 16 August to 3 November 2024, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel present Cotton under my feet: The Zurich chapter, a project by the internationally renowned artist Walid Raad. Its central element is the walkthrough: a combined performance and tour in which the artist guides visitors through a number of rooms in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich. The project is the first cooperation between the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel, and opens up a cross-disciplinary dialogue between the visual arts and theatre.

What do museums represent in the 21st century? How do they deal with the age-old blurring of borders between private and public collections? What specific forms of storytelling do museums make possible today? What kinds of personal, historical, and aesthetic considerations motivate creative acts and their displays? How can we see that which hides in plain sight in artworks and listen to the silences inscribed within them? These are some of the questions that are the focus of Walid Raad’s exhibition Cotton under my feet: The Zurich chapter and the accompanying Two drops per heartbeat performance-tour, in which the artist engages the weighty ideological, economic, and historical challenges facing cultural institutions in the 21st century and, more importantly, their aesthetic antidotes.

A LABYRINTHINE EXPEDITION THROUGH THE COLLECTION

These questions are of central importance to museums, and especially relevant to the Kunsthaus Zürich, as the issue of how to deal with the Emil Bührle Collection has shown. An acute observer of our times, Walid Raad proceeds from an investigation into multiple public and private, Western and non-Western art collections and museums. His emphasis is as much on the worldly forces that condition their forms, as it is on the ‘otherworldly’, intangible, and counter-intuitive cracks they manifest. The starting point for his current project is the collection of Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, which was sold to Spain and is on display in Madrid since 1993. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection is also closely linked to Switzerland as it was housed in the baron’s Swiss Villa Favorita on Lake Lugano for decades. More broadly, the Kunsthaus Zürich has close ties to private collectors dating back to the early years of the 20th century, ranging from the collection of Hans Schuler and Ottilie W. Roederstein (donated in 1920) to the Looser Collection (on long-term loan since 2021). With his exhibition in the Kunsthaus Zürich, Walid Raad imagines yet another sale, transfer, and display of a private collection in a public museum. The artist explores an imaginary world in which parts of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection end up in the Kunsthaus Zurich.

AESTHETIC ENCOUNTERS WITH STRANGE ARTIFACTS

In his exhibition and accompanying walkthrough, Walid Raad imagines and narrates several aesthetic encounters with strange artifacts, among them a Persian carpet, images of clouds, gold and silver medieval cups, and depictions of American swamps and marches. Juxtaposing his own works with objects from the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Kunsthaus Zurich collections, the artist tries to disentangle the artifacts’ strangeness, focusing on some of the histories buried in and around the artifacts. The result is a dense web of narratives that links in an intuitive and intriguing way the history of the collections with the political, economic, and social history of the modern world: from slavery and racism in North America to the Cold War and the trouble spots of our present day; from weather forecasting technologies to the realm of the undeath.

PERFORMANCE AS CENTRAL ELEMENT OF THE EXHIBITION

Central to the exhibition is a combined performance and tour by Walid Raad lasting around 80 minutes. Referred to as walkthroughs, these unique explorations of the Kunsthaus invite visitors to take a strange yet informative journey through the museum and to encourage them to consider some of the odd, beautiful, thought-provoking, frightful, and joyful aspects of art.

Photo: Kunsthaus Zürich, Franca Candrian