The Shedhalle on the area of the Roten Fabrik: The Rote Fabrik (Red Factory), was originally built as a mechanical silk-weaving mill according to plans drafted by architect Carl Arnold Sequin in 1892. As in many industrial buildings erected during the period, the natural light required for the production halls was provided either by sawtooth (shed) or skylight roofs, for which Carl Arnold Sequin and Karl Lohle held the Swiss patent. Following a succession of owners and a period of vacancy, the city of Zurich purchased the Rote Fabrik in 1972. The original plan was to demolish the building to be able to widen the adjacent street. But the Monument Preservation Society and the Social Democratic Party launched a successful grass-roots initiative in opposition to these plans. The factory was to be preserved as a culture and recreation centre. In 1977, the City Council was for this purpose tasked to develop a plan for the utilisation of the Rote Fabrik. Three years later, popular unrest prompted accelerated efforts to establish the Rote Fabrik as an alternative cultural centre.

The institution Shedhalle: The Shedhalle, forming part of the Rote Fabrik, evolved from an interest group of local artists who felt under-represented in the established art system. Later disagreements between the artists and the group that ran the centre led to the separation of the Shedhalle from the Rote Fabrik in 1986. The Shedhalle founded their own association in 1987, and shortly after that, publicly advertised the posts of curator and manager for the first time. The board consists of 6–8 members responsible for structuring the work and the team as well as for electing the curators, thus laying the groundwork for the programming concept. Shedhalle currently has a team of two curators in place for a period of three years.

Shedhalle is an institution of contemporary art, in a structure comparable to an association. Shedhalle defines itself as a place where new forms of artistic and cultural practices–regarding socio-political topics particularly–can be tried out, produced, and presented within the framework of alternate thematic exhibitions. Shedhalle could be considered as having become a niche institution (among others), that constitutes a multifaceted approach to programming.

Shedhalle is a cultural think tank that is permanently developing new and self-reflexive approaches to the production and representation of art. Shedhalle is a forum for artists, activists, curators, scientists, theoreticians, and students, that permits and enables each of these individuals and groups to approach diverse topics in varying contexts.

For a Practice of Pausing and Interrupting (Anke Hoffmann and Yvonne Volkart, curators):
Since it changed from a one-curator-model to a collaborative-curator-team in the year 1994, Shedhalle has been a place for political art. Initially the aim was to question, the relations between production and consumption as shaped by social hierarchies in the art scene, to depart from traditional forms of the representation of art in the White Cube, and to connect art with the social environment. Art should no longer deal with reality solely in a protected space, but intervene in a more direct way, interfere with reality, become part of the social environment. This new emphasis, laid on socio-political attitudes, grew on the background of a general change in attitudes focusing on communicative and social aspects in the European and north-American fields of art during the 1990s, that was debated under headings such as activism, relational aesthetics, contextual art, institutional art, or media art.

To shape art as a social happening, be process-oriented, collectively organised or transdisciplinary does not automatically mean to question the dominant culture. The changing teams heading the Shedhalle have been emphasising these differences again and again and have partly handled the differences in radical, political ways. Today, confronted with an art scene that is as globalised as particularised, which has grown accustomed to interventional and activist practices, and in which many engaged artists of the 1990s have become authorities, requires a different approach when working with politics in art.

Shedhalle is of the opinion that not only should we have to question the dominant culture, or rather: cultures, but that we should also be questioning the system of dual ideologies themselves, and, in turn, the variable forms of inclusions or exclusions, the subtle mechanisms of the distortion of what’s right or wrong. Yet the structural mechanisms of the cultural production of meaning does not necessarily entail a non-critical attitude. In order to offer criticism, one has to be in connection with, and in a permanent discussion with the full context.

Shedalle presents approximately 6 exhibitions each year.

Most outstanding projects in recent years:

Cross-fades. Reconstructing the Future, Zbynek Baladran (CZ), Rossella Biscotti (I/NL), Daniela Comani (I/D), Christoph Draeger (CH/US), Karen Geyer (D/CH), Hofmann/Lindholm (D), Knowbotic Research (AT/CH/D), Uriel Orlow (CH/UK), Suzanne Treister (PL/UK), Sarah Vanagt (B), Miriam Vysaczki (D), Curated by Anke Hoffmann und Yvonne Volkart, 9. October–23. December 2010.

Work to do! Self-Organisation in Precarious Working Conditions, Thematic Project Series, Bankleer, Saskia Holmkvist, Andrea Knobloch, Folke Kšbberling/Martin Kaltwasser, Andreja Kuluncic, RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), Mirjam Wirz, Curated by S¿nke Gau and Katharina Schlieben, 2 March–22 April 2007; 20 October 2007–24 February 2008; 29 March–8 June 2008.

From early on, the Shedhalle continuously discussed its status as a role model of neo-liberalism. Shedhalle still focuses on this question, and regularly plans events involving the theories regarding new forms of subjectivisation. Yet it wants to confront this question in a different way, by making the Shedhalle, very consciously, a space for pausing and interrupting.

Shedhalle acts out this approach through the array and presentation of its projects as well as the topics chosen, such as the aesthetics of sustainability, sleeping and dreaming as models of resistance, community versus society and individual, and historiography and the reflection of the media. This attitude can be directly experienced on site, on the fringes of the city. Stopping and pausing does not mean flight or recreation. It means the halting, the temporary stopping of the engine. We are convinced that is one of the most important means of art to be able to create a temporary time-out, to create pauses and interspaces.

Surface area/capacity: 744 m2