Ayo Akingbade: Crossing / Caspar Heinemann: Tempting Fate

Kunsthalle Zürich is pleased to announce new exhibitions by Ayo Akingbade and Caspar Heinemann. 

Ayo Akingbade
Crossing
September 26, 2026–January 10, 2027

Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first institutional solo exhibition outside the UK by London-based filmmaker and artist Ayo Akingbade (b. 1994, London). Bringing together two new productions as well as earlier works, Crossing traces Akingbade’s continued engagement with urbanism and architecture and the social and political forces that shape them.

In over twenty short films realised in the past decade, Akingbade has combined experimental documentary, fiction, and personal essay, focusing on specific locations and their architecture—from social housing to shopping centres and factories—which the artist usually captures on celluloid. But Akingbade is less interested in architecture as built form than in how people inhabit or share these spaces, and how social and political changes manifest themselves within those engineered environments.

Akingbade was born in Hackney, an East London area that has witnessed profound urban and social transformation. Questions related to gentrification, housing, and the displacement of local communities were at the centre of many of her earlier works. These concerns also recur in Deadphant (2020), a three-minute portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, shot on Super 8 during its final weekend before closure.

The Fist (2022), Akingbade’s earliest work using a 35mm camera, focuses on Nigeria, where her family hails from. Filmed at the Guinness brewery in Lagos, the film follows the workers and machines as they carry out their repetitive, finely orchestrated tasks. In Nichtschwimmer (2026), the artist herself appears as the protagonist, performing simple swimming exercises in a historic Art Nouveau swimming pool.

In Two Truths (2026), commissioned for the exhibition and filmed in Zurich, Akingbade once more turns to the relationship between body, movement, and architecture. Referencing Trisha Brown’s landmark performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), the film recasts Brown’s simple yet radical idea of walking vertically down the façade of a building in a different context. Movements, paths, and gazes intersect—or cross—without resolving into a single perspective. Together, the works trace movement across different cities, architectures, and cinematic approaches.


Caspar Heinemann
Tempting Fate
September 26, 2026–January 10, 2027

In his sculptures, installations, performances, drawings, and texts, Glasgow-based artist Caspar Heinemann (b. 1994, London) casts language, narratives, and historical fragments into material and spatial forms. He often combines queer and countercultural histories with references to folk art and vernacular architecture, as well as spiritual and literary traditions that hold unexpected narratives and characters. Highlighting his interest in craft and materiality, the exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich unfolds around a new, large-scale installation in which Heinemann looks to the night sky, a recurring motif in his work.

ABRACADABRA (2026) includes wooden pallets and a hand-embroidered curtain that divides the Kunsthalle’s space in two and is reminiscent of an improvised theatre setup in a school or community hall. Taking the form of two identical stages installed back-to-back, the back of each stage serves as the front of the other. Like the wooden pallets, the black curtain follows a deliberately handmade aesthetic. Sewn from different fabrics, with roughly stitched stars and exposed threads and seams, it references Heinemann’s experience of punk, DIY, and squatting cultures and their use of readily available materials. The processes of making, mending, and deliberately introducing patchwork are purposefully ambiguous. The night sky, both geographically specific and universal, becomes a surface onto which humans project and give meaning to something ultimately incomprehensible.

Set in dialogue with ABRACADABRA is 2x Early Post War Black Forrest Cuckoo Clocks Hand Painted Shields Restoration (2026): two wooden clocks from Germany’s Black Forest region were restored to working condition and fitted with contact microphones and speakers that amplify their ticking throughout the exhibition space. In contrast to the improvised appeal of ABRACADABRA, the clocks evoke folk culture and traditional craft, but were mass produced for export between 1947 and 1952, when pre-World War II production methods were briefly resumed. What interests Heinemann is the way in which the ‘Völkisch’ imagery associated with Nazism continued to hold mass appeal in the aftermath of the war, and how the opposing aesthetics of the two works might correspond to the social and ethical ideas associated with them—ultimately raising questions about the role of the imaginal in the political.

Shifts and ambiguities are also reflected in Heinemann’s use of language. The exhibition title Tempting Fate carries two meanings: that of a fate that is tempting, and the English expression “to tempt fate”—to dare, challenge, even taunt it; to imagine or say something and thereby risk bringing it into being. In other words: careful what you wish for.

Made possible with the support of the Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung.