October 21–December 20, 2020
FEAR TOUCH POLICE
October 26, 2020–January 14, 2022
November 18–December 20, 2020
Haunted Haus
Including works by Melanie Akeret, Alfatih, James Bantone, Miriam Cahn, Maïté Chénière, Victoria Colmegna, Jesse Darling, Olivia Erlanger, Gabriele Garavaglia, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Morag Keil, Milena Langer, Claire van Lubeek, Win McCarthy, Ivan Mitrovic, Alan Schmalz, Cassidy Toner, Gaia Vincensini, Andro Wekua
October 21–December 20, 2020
“What is anachronistic about the ghost story is its peculiarly contingent and constitutive dependence of physical place and, in particular, on the material house as such.” –Frederic Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining"
SI is pleased to present Haunted Haus—a spectral space where bodies, images, sounds and smells fester and mingle. The group exhibition features works by 20 artists that reflect on the spirits we project into the world, the forces that insist without existing, and the anachronism and experience of haunting.
Haunted Haus draws on the concept of hauntology[1], which has inspired various writers and thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Mark Fisher, who described it in his 2012 essay “What is Hauntology?” as a haunting by lost futures that failed to happen. Haunting, Fisher writes, “happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.” Such residues are explored in this exhibition, as they cling to and animate spaces and things.
Unfolding and expanding over the show’s duration, Haunted Haus will be installed across three floors of SI. One gallery is recast as an eerie domestic setting beset with flamboyant demons, paintings that laugh, and a melody that emanates from the abyss. Another explores the architecture of houses themselves, the stages on which the spectacles of our memories play, sticky with the remnants of history.
SI ONLINE | Sable Elyse Smith: FEAR TOUCH POLICE
October 26, 2020–January 14, 2022
Swiss Institute is pleased to present FEAR TOUCH POLICE, a new multimedia project organized by New York-based artist Sable Elyse Smith in advance of the 6th Edition of SI's Architecture and Design Series in 2022, which she will be curating. The first issue, FEAR, features newly commissioned writing by Jessica Lynne and Jason Moran, video works by Paul Pfeiffer and Johan Grimonprez, and a poem by Jibade-Khalil Huffman. When inviting these five contributors, Smith encouraged them to contemplate Kendrick Lamar’s song of the same name off his 2017 album DAMN. To read more about the project and to visit the site, please click here.
Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi
November 18–December 20, 2020
This two-person presentation of underrecognized 20th-century writer and artist Emmy Hennings (b. 1885, d. 1948) and emerging Zurich-based artist Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi (b. 1995) was originally presented at Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire this past spring, where it was curated by director Salome Hohl. The exhibition situates Henning's rarely-seen archive of art and writing within a series of vitrines and showcases made by Ghaznawi. Hennings, who co-founded Cabaret Voltaire in 1915 with her romantic partner, renowned Dadaist Hugo Ball, received little recognition during her lifetime, while Ghaznawi's presentation subtly raises questions regarding remembrance and memorial in public and private spaces.
Haunted Haus is made possible in part through the SI Annual Exhibition Fund. SI wishes to thank the lenders to the exhibition: Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Chapter NY; Gaudel de Stampa, Paris; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Anne and Arthur Goldstein; International Flavors and Fragrances; and Galerie Philippzollinger. SI additionally wishes to thank Margaux Bosquillon de Jenlis, Penelope Bigelow, Jocelyn Wolff and Sandrine Djerouet.
SI Programming is made possible in part with public funds from Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council; the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Main sponsors include LUMA Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Friends of SI. SI gratefully acknowledges Swiss Re as SI ONSITE Partner, Vitra as Design Partner, Crozier Fine Arts as Preferred Shipping Art Logistics Partner, and SWISS as Travel Partner.
[1] Hauntology, a word with phonic similarity to “ontology,” is a term first coined by Jacques Derrida in lectures given at the symposium “Whither Marxism” at UC Riverside in 1993, later published as Spectres of Marx (1993). There, he discusses the particular ways that the “spectre of Communism,” mentioned by Marx in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, would continue to haunt the world after “the End of History” (Francis Fukuyama, 1992). The concept found new resonance in the 2010s, particularly through the work of the British writer and critic Mark Fisher (1968–2017).
