Annual programme 2026

Otobong Nkanga. I dreamt of you in colours
April 3–August 23, 2026

At once a survey and a cross-section of Otobong Nkanga’s protean oeuvre from the past thirty years, the exhibition I dreamt of you in colours traces the genealogy of recurring subjects whose plastic actualisation is constantly evolving. Since the late 1990s, Nkanga (b. 1974 in Kano, Nigeria; lives in Antwerp, Belgium) has been exploring issues relating to mining, the use of the Earth’s resources, and the body in its relationship to space and the land. She examines complex social, political and material relationships in her multidisciplinary body of work, consisting of drawings, installations, paintings, textiles, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, performances, sound and poetry.

Drawing on her personal history and research, which reflects multiple transhistorical influences, she creates networks and constellations between humans and landscapes, while addressing the restorative capacity of natural and relational systems. The notion of strata is central to Nkanga’s work – both in the materiality of her works, and in her way of thinking about the relationships between bodies and the lands they inhabit and transform, and which in turn transform them. The artist simultaneously explores the circulation of materials and goods, of people and their intertwined histories, as well as their exploitation, marked by the residues of violent colonial histories. While questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

Ted Joans. Black Flower
October 9, 2026–February 28, 2027 

This first monographic exhibition devoted to American artist Ted Joans (1928–2003) presents an extensive overview of his poetic and visual work. An unclassifiable figure, Joans fused Surrealism, jazz, Black Power, and Pan-Africanism into a distinctive creative language that defied traditional artistic boundaries.

As a teenager, Joans honed his craft as a trumpeter in a bebop ensemble before making his way to New York in the early 1950s. There, deeply embedded in the Beat Generation’s vibrant artistic community, he began performing his poems in the cafés of Greenwich Village. His writing affirmed a Black consciousness, expressed through a language animated by the rhythms of blues and jazz. At the same time, he developed a visual practice informed by Surrealism and grounded in his fascination with Africa, which he regarded as the most surreal of continents. Confronted with persistent racism in the United States, Joans moved to Paris in the early 1960s and adopted a nomadic lifestyle between Europe and Africa. Whether working with words, sounds, or images, he transformed collage into an aesthetic and political strategy that was both subversive and playful.

Although André Breton considered him “the only African American Surrealist,” Joans’s tricontinental trajectory far exceeded the boundaries of this movement, traversing multiple intellectual, activist, and geographical contexts, which the exhibition seeks to retrace. Bringing together drawings, paintings, films, and archival materials, Ted Joans. Black Flower will present a large body of previously unseen works, supported by extensive archival research and made possible through close collaboration with the artist’s estate.

Marina Xenofontos. Play Life
February 6–August 2, 2026 (Project Space)

Through sculptures, found objects, writings, and films, Marina Xenofontos (b. 1988 in Cyprus; lives and works between Athens and Limassol) explores the material manifestations of memory and history. Through precise gestures, the artist lends new weight to objects that she moves, replicates, or transforms, simultaneously reconfiguring the space they inhabit. At the intersection of real and virtual space, the exhibition Play Life is articulated around the video game Twice Upon a While (2018-2025), which is shown here in its definitive form for the first time and in which visitors are active participants. The question of the identical or the almost same, of the authentic and the replica is diffracted and refracted in the exhibition space, in a slipping between levels of reality, between given contexts and uses.

Lucas Erin
Manor Art Prize 2026 Vaud
August 28, 2026–February 14, 2027 (Project Space)

The work of Lucas Erin (b. 1990 in Clamart, France; lives and works in Lausanne) revolves around installation, sculpture and sound. Interested in the notion of contact, of which objects are the trace, attentive to the question of the relationship between interior and exterior and the shifting boundary that separates them, Erin explores, through concise gestures, what happens or fails in an exchange. Questions of circulation and sharing are at the heart of his reflections. His found objects and carefully crafted sculptures contain both the threads of interwoven stories and hints of narratives in the making. Inspired by thinkers of creolisation, revisiting his Martinican heritage through the prism of his connection to the land and the plants that grow there, the artist works by associations and reappropriations, allowing new possibilities to emerge in the exhibition space.

For more information about the full programme and the Collection displays, visit www.mcba.ch