Jean Tinguely bei der Materialsuche in Paris 1960

Jean Tinguely looking for materials, Paris, 1960, photo: unknown

La roue = c'est tout
Permanent exhibition

8 February 2023 – 2026

According to Tinguely, ‘we live in a wheeled civilisation’. Even today, our lives are shaped largely by the relationship between man and machine and the resulting dependencies that Tinguely deconstructed with such relish. Now, for the first time since the museum was founded, its enlarged collection of Tinguely’s own works is to return to the great hall. There visitors will be able to discover the intricate and poetic early works, the explosive happenings and collaborations of the 1960s, and the musical, monumental and sombre works of Tinguely’s late period, all presented in an entertaining and eventful tour with many opportunities for hands-on participation.

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Julian Charrière, Albedo, 2024. Copyright the artist; 2025 Prolitteris, Zürich

Julian Charrière. Midnight Zone

11 June – 2 November 2025

 

A core concern of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière is how the human being inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us. In a comprehensive solo exhibition, Museum Tinguely presents photographs, sculptures, installations and new film works that deal with our relationship to Earth as a world of water – a liquidity that covers most of our planet with seas, lakes and ice, both habitat for a myriad of organisms and host to circulatory systems critical for the stability of our climate. The exhibition Midnight Zone engages with these underwater ecologies, from the local influential presence of the Rhine to distant oceans, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic debilitation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its both mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

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Oliver Ressler, We Are the Forest Enclosed by the Wall, 4K video, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, àngels barcelona © ProLitteris, Zurich

Oliver Ressler. Scenes from the Invention of Democracy

24 September 2025 – 1 March 2026

‘What is Democracy?’ This is the question at the centre of Oliver Ressler's eponymous video installation from 2009, for which he interviewed activists and analysts around the world. In view of climate change and the rise of the right in Europe, the question of political participation is as urgent as ever. Ressler’s new work, presented here for the first time, also deals with protest, in this case against the planned expansion of a car testing track that threatened a forest in Apulia, a drought-stricken region in Italy.

 

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#whatisdemocracy @oliver.ressler

Carl Cheng Nature Never Loses

Carl Cheng, Documentation of Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool, 1988, Courtesy the artist

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses

3 December 2025 – 10 May 2026
 

Nature Never Loses surveys six decades of the prescient, genre-defying practice of artist Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco; lives and works in Santa Monica), whose ever-evolving body of work engages with environmental change, the relevance of art institutions to their publics, and the role of technology in society. His inventive lexicon includes photographic sculptures, 'art tools' employed in the production of ephemeral artworks, 'nature machines' that anticipate an artificial world shaped by humans, and extra-institutional interventions intended to reach broad audiences.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is organized by The Contemporary Austin in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Bonnefanten, Maastricht; Museum Tinguely, Basel; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

 

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#natureneverloses

Nicolas Darrot, Yuki Otoko, 2025 (Detail). Courtesy the artist et Galerie C, photo: Nicolas Darrot

Nicolas Darrot. Fuzzy Logic

5 March 2026 - 7 March 2027

 

Fuzzy logic, a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to deal with "fuzzy" concepts, mimics human reasoning. It doesn't just have the strictly binary 1 (yes, true) or 0 (no, false), but works with gradations to describe states like warm or cool linguistically rather than strictly mathematically. Nicolas Darrot's Fuzzy Logic characters are full of insecurities and mood swings; their dancing is spontaneous, their acting is complex, their talent imperfect.
 

Angelica Mesiti, The Rites of When, 2024 (video still), © 2025 ProLitteris, Zürich, Copyright the artist

Angelica Mesiti. Reverb

18 March – 30 August 2026

 

In her works, Angelica Mesiti explores alternative forms of communication, from oral traditions to musical and performative modes of expression. Her video installations evoke the poetry of the everyday and show how exchanges via sound and gesture can create community. The Rites of When (2024) rethinks age-old seasonal rituals; the work offers a sensuous exploration of ways to connect with others in times of ecological uncertainty and societal change.

Alexandra Navratil: The Night Side (Video Still), Video HD 4:20 min., 2016. Courtesy the artist

Labouring Bodies

10 June – 8 November 2026

 

Labouring Bodies explores the manifold interdependence between body and technology from a feminist perspective. The group exhibition shows how the human body—especially the feminized and marginalized human body—has since the dawn of the modern age been shaped and controlled by machines, while also being understood as a site of resistance. Artists cast light on working with machines, on the technologization of production and reproduction, and on women’s contribution to technological progress, inviting visitors to rethink their notions of body, labour and care.

 

 

 

 

Zilla Leutenegger, Think twice, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Paris, photo: Sebastian Schaub

Zilla Leutenegger. ZWISCH ENRAUM/HINDU RCHZUSCHAUN

23 September 2026 – 7 March 2027

 

A glimpse through the door gap, a noise under the stairs, a shadow in the rafters: it's as if someone has moved into the museum. Zilla Leutenegger's multimedia installations ZWISCH ENRAUM / HINDU RCHZUSCHAUN are fragments of inhabited architecture and sketches of a life. These fragments between things not only tell short, poetic stories, but also invite you to rediscover the museum—and see it with different eyes.

© Claudiabasel

Les témoins oculistes. The sense of sight in art

2 December 2026 – 9 May 2027

 

The Museum Tinguely continues its series on the senses in fine art. The group show on the sense of sight presents artworks in various media from the Baroque to the present day that offer a range of surprising visual experiences. When looking at art, we are inevitably confronted with the basic facts of visual perception: the interplay of light, darkness, colour, movement and space. For centuries, artists have been experimenting with techniques, mechanisms and devices with which to question and reinvent the cultural conditions under which we see our surroundings and their representation in art. In many cases, they deliberately trouble our everyday view of reality by including disturbances and illusions in their works, such as distortion, inversion or mirroring.