PerformanceProcess. 60 Years of Performance
Art in Switzerland

20 September 2017 – 28 January 2018

 

The city of Basel celebrates the breadth and diversity of Swiss performance art from 1960 to the present through an exceptional institutional collaboration between the Museum Tinguely, Kaserne Basel, and Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with the Centre culturel suisse in Paris. Together these institutions illuminate performative practices in Switzerland—looking back, for instance, to when Jean Tinguely blew up the Basel Carnival Committee in a performative action in 1974, and looking forward, with new performances by established and emerging artists.

Upcoming Live-Performances

19 & 25 January 2018
26-27 January 2018 Symposium
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Wim Delvoye

14 June 2017 – 1 January 2018

 

The Museum Tinguely is to dedicate a major solo exhibition to the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye in the summer of 2017. In addition to his best known works, the Cloaca, which are machines that simulate human digestion and produce excrement that is visually indistinguishable from human excrement, the show will also feature pieces such as Chantier (1992), a construction site carved entirely out of wood and the huge Cement Truck (2016) in its original size. With a hefty shot of irony, wit and humour, this conceptualist provocateur often combines the decorative with the quotidian and by doing so casts doubt on consumer society’s conventional value systems.

In collaboration with MUDAM, Luxembourg.

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Jérôme Zonder. The Dancing Room

(Danse Macabre No. I)
7 June – 1 November 2017

 

To mark the opening of Tinguely’s Mengele-Totentanz (Mengele Dance of Death) in the Museum Tinguely’s new exhibition space, the young French artist Jérome Zonder will rouse the undead with a series of mischievous images snatched from real life. His installation of drawings assembles interpretations of the TV series The Walking Dead – with scenes of violence or the aftermath of accidents and disasters masquerading as innocuous children’s games. It is the first in a series of replicas adding further chapters to Basel’s Dance of Death.

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Nevin Aladağ. Traces, 2015

13 June - 17 September 2017

Three-channel HD video installation, color, sound, 6’03’’
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Stephen Cripps. Performing Machines

27 January – 1 May 2017

 

The oeuvre of British artist Stephen Cripps (1952-1982) was highly innovative and experimental. His works developed out of an interest for kinetic sculpture and machines as well as from a fascination for the poetic potential of explosion and destruction. Until his early death Cripps built machines and interactive installations and realised pyrotechnic performances. With his performative and multisensorial artistic practices he focussed primarily on experiments with sound. He pushed the boundaries with his radical performances, many of which even now would be unthinkable due to their potential danger to the audience and their immediate surrounds. Cripps developed many of his projects in the medium of drawing and collage, which provide an insight into his rich and unconventional mindset. This exhibition provides an opportunity for a rediscovery of Cripps’ work which is presented on a large scale for the first time at Museum Tinguely. The exhibition is a co-operation with the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

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Dimitri de Perrot. Strandgut und Blumen
An interactive sound installation

 26 February –19 March 2017

Strandgut und Blumen (Flotsam, Jetsam and Flowers) is what the Swiss artist and director Dimitri de Perrot calls his sound installation, which will be on view at the Museum Tinguely from 26 February to 19 March 2017. Set up amid the current exhibition, it forms an installation that enters into a musical dialogue with its surroundings. Noises, reverberations and overtones combine to form soundscapes that populate the room with new protagonists and coalesce in a total composition in which Tinguely’s Méta-Harmonies also play a part.
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Jean Tinguely, Grosse Méta-Maxi-Utopia, 1987 © 2016 ProLitteris Zurich; Photo: Museum Tinguely Basel, Samuel Oppliger (2016 on show at Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf)

Jean Tinguely’s “Grosse Méta-Maxi-Maxi-Utopia” is back at the Museum Tinguely!

After a long stay at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf Utopia has returned to Museum Tinguely. This walk-on machine dominated the Jean Tinguely retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1987. With its enormous wheel-work made out of cast models from the company Von Roll, by his own admission he was trying to create “something bright and cheerful,” “something for children to clamber and jump about.” At the same time, the architectonic construction was intended to be useful for reaching the upper story; unfortunately, this was not permitted during the exhibition.