Art at Hirschengraben

Deep Decor, Really Rustic, and Fall/Winter Collection are the titles of recent exhibitions by Roman Gysin, the latter also the title of the presented wall installation. They reflect the artist’s interest in decoration and lifestyle and the social dimensions that underlie them.

Sandra Knecht presents here a selection from her ongoing series, Home is a Foreign Place. Started in 2016, it currently comprises a collection of over 300 Heimatgläser (homeland jars).

The Montesinos Foundation (TMF) presents: LIBERTAS LIBERTAS! The motto of the foundation by Elena Montesinos is: “Some people make money with art & power, TMF makes art with money & power instead.”

The words LIEBE, BAUCHWEH, GEFÜHLE (love, stomach pains, feelings) float in the form of a long, colourful banner above an office desk, over the door frame in one of the corridors, and on the wall next to the printer. The letters were carefully cut by hand from selected textiles from Milan, and stitched onto a fabric background in tight zigzags.

A few years ago, Noha Mokhtar had the opportunity to participate in a traditional lila, also called derdeba, a healing ritual of the Gnawa tribe in Morocco. The Gnawa, a black African minority from the southern Sahara who originally came to the country through enslavement, combine Sufism with pre-Islamic African and animist rituals in their culture.

What kinds of forms do people give to the objects that surround themselves with in everyday life? Functionality may be a Western capitalist credo of product design, but if we expand the temporal, geographical and cultural horizon, this maxim soon becomes obsolete.

Ramaya Tegegne is co-founder of Wages For Wages Against, an initiative that campaigns for better working conditions and fair pay for artists. Whereas just a few years ago it was acceptable for artists to create exhibitions or take part in events without pay, today, thanks to campaigns like this one, artist fees have now become more common (though still far from universal) practice.

A face with one mouth, two noses, and three eyes – Marie Matusz has for a while been working with this curious figure, whose origins lie in an Italian backyard. There, Matusz found the broken piece of a stone relief, with this ambiguous figure all that remained. Is it the moon and/or sun? Two faces overlap; …