Envisioned by museum director Séverine Fromaigeat and performance artist Paul Maheke, the exhibition offers a journey alongside objects of incredibly diverse forms and functions. Freely associated, they unfold from room to room, like territories to be explored, a memory rising to the surface, or spirits awakening.

L’article Pleasing the Spirits est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

These shields are more than just tools for protection, they have been used in battles, rituals, and social events. Each shield highlights the skill of the cultures that made them, transforming them into more than just defensive objects.

L’article Boucliers d’Afrique est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.

This project is built around comparisons between select pieces from the Barbier-Mueller collections and works that Jacques Kaufmann has produced in his studio and around the world, over a long stretch of time, the aim being to identify similarities – as well as differences – between them.

The exhibition juxtaposes works of different origins, time periods and materials, suggesting resonances but also inviting viewers to create their own connections. Ultimately, it is the viewer who “makes the picture”.

An encounter

A sanctuary of objects of varying origins, each one more remarkable than the last, the Musée Barbier-Mueller houses a collection that is recognized internationally as a leading centre for the so-called “primitive” – or “distant”– arts, depending on the terminology in use at different times.

Ceramics, which comes under the umbrella of contemporary art and its contextual practices, also looks for encounters with whatever produces continuities and disjunctions within human expression, across time and space. In the field of the arts, the past does not really pass. Forms are reactivated, re-emerge, reappropriate one other, come together again.

The disparities, connections, conjunctions, analogies, intervals between works allow us to perceive those things that might contribute to bringing about our long-term collective effort as humans to meet our fundamental spiritual needs. The endurance and movement of forms contradict the notion of progress in art.

This exhibition features in the program of the 50th Congress of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC), organized by swissceramics, which will be held at the Geneva International Congress Centre from 12^th to 16^th September 2022 on the theme “Melting Pot. From the Alchemical Crucible to the Cultural Crucible”. This event is accompanied by 35 major exhibitions organized by partner museums and galleries in Romandie.

Exhibition catalogue>

L’article Subtle distinctions and connections est apparu en premier sur Barbier-Mueller Museum.