Jean Tinguely bei der Materialsuche in Paris 1960

Jean Tinguely looking for materials, Paris, 1960, photo: unknown

La roue = c'est tout
Permanent exhibition

8 February 2023 – 2026

According to Tinguely, ‘we live in a wheeled civilisation’. Even today, our lives are shaped largely by the relationship between man and machine and the resulting dependencies that Tinguely deconstructed with such relish. Now, for the first time since the museum was founded, its enlarged collection of Tinguely’s own works is to return to the great hall. There visitors will be able to discover the intricate and poetic early works, the explosive happenings and collaborations of the 1960s, and the musical, monumental and sombre works of Tinguely’s late period, all presented in an entertaining and eventful tour with many opportunities for hands-on participation.

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Piet Esch, Ruth Altenbach and Dunia Lingner playing String Figures, 2024. Digital Video / Screenshot. Courtesy of the Artist / Point de Vue.

String Figures / Fadenspiele
A Research Exhibition

20 November 2024 – 9 March 2025

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, loops of string make shapes. String figures can do many things: they tell stories, they pass the time, they make the unsayable showable, they connect people. Whatever else they may be, they have often been explored by artists, ethnologists and theorists: as an aesthetic practice, as something to collect, as a non-Western way of thinking. The exhibition looks at ways of playing together on the ruins of our history.

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MT_FreshWindow_JeanTinguelysRotozazaIII_1000x1000

Jean Tinguely's Rotozaza III in the shop window of the Loeb department stores' in Bern, October 1969
© Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern, photo: Fredo Meyer-Henn

Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art

4 December 2024 – 11 May 2025

For decades, there have been close links between the histories of art and shop window display. Besides Jean Tinguely, many other artists have designed pioneering window displays. Conversely, window displays frequently feature as a motif in artworks or serve as a stage for performances and actions. The exhibition will explore this eventful relationship from its beginnings to the present day, while artistic interventions in shop windows in Basel extend the show into public space.

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Suzanne Lacy, De tu puño y letra (By Your Own Hand), 2014-2015/2019. Quito, Ecuador.
Courtesy the artist, photo: Hai Zhang, courtesy Queens Museum

Suzanne Lacy: By Your Own Hand

9 April – 7 September 2025

In her video installation De tu puño y letra (By Your Own Hand) (2014–2015/2019), Suzanne Lacy puts us in the middle of a bull fighting arena and confronts us with harrowing accounts of women’s experiences of violence. The Los Angeles-based artist has been a pioneer of social practice, feminism and performance art since the 1970s.

Julian Charrière, Midnight Zone (Behind the scenes)
Copyright the artist; 2024 ProLitteris, Zürich, Foto: Antoine Dranceyv

Julian Charrière. Midnight Zone

11 June – 2 November 2025

 

A core concern of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière is how the human being inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us. In a comprehensive solo exhibition, Museum Tinguely presents
photographs, sculptures, installations and new film works that deal with our relationship to Earth as a world of water – a liquidity that covers most of our planet with seas, lakes and ice, both habitat for a myriad of organisms and host to circulatory systems critical for the stability of our climate. The exhibition Midnight Zone engages with these underwater ecologies, from the local influential presence of the Rhine to distant oceans, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic debilitation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its both mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

Oliver Ressler, Footage of the new production for Scenes from the Invention of Democracy, Videostill, 2024, Copyright the artist

Oliver Ressler. Scenes from the Invention of Democracy

24 September 2025 – 1 March 2026
 

For his video installation What is Democracy? (2009), Oliver Ressler interviewed analysts and activists engaging in civil disobedience around the world, offering insights into their modes of organization. In view of climate change and the rise of the right in Europe, the question of political participation is as urgent as ever. Ressler’s new work, presented here for the first time, also deals with protest, in this case against the planned expansion of a car testing track that threatens a forest in Apulia, a drought-stricken region in Italy.

Carl Cheng Nature Never Loses

Carl Cheng, Alternative TV #3, 1979. Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, photo: Ruben Diaz

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses

3 December 2025 – 10 May 2026
 

Nature Never Loses surveys six decades of the prescient, genre-defying practice of artist Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco; lives and works in Santa Monica), whose ever-evolving body of work engages with environmental change, the relevance of art institutions to their publics, and the role of technology in society. His inventive lexicon includes photographic sculptures, 'art tools' employed in the production of ephemeral artworks, 'nature machines' that anticipate an artificial world shaped by humans, and extra-institutional interventions intended to reach broad audiences.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is organized by The Contemporary Austin in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Bonnefanten, Maastricht; Museum Tinguely, Basel; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.