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

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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#larouecesttout #tinguely @museumtinguely

MikaRottenberg_quadratisch

Mika Rottenberg, NoNoseKnows, 2015 (film still)
© Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Factory

5 June 2024 – 3 November 2024

Mika Rottenberg’s art humorously confronts us with the absurdity of our excessive production of commodities. Her films are colourful and painterly, celebrating a surreal poetry whose protagonists often resemble cogwheels in a fantastic machine. In this way, they recall Tinguely’s critique of consumerism expressed in his poetic 'machines inutiles'. The exhibition shows a representative selection of Rottenberg’s films and installations, as well as interactive kinetic works.

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#antimatterfactory @mikarottenberg

The Alex Silber Archive presents
The Bible

Film presentation in the phone booth - 1 May 2024 – 10 November 2024

The Alex Silber Archive presents a digital version of THE BIBLE by Bernhard Einstein, the shortest blockbuster movie ever made. The animated film reveals a self-encounter.

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Fadenspiele

Hands playing string figures, video still © Christoph Oeschger

String Figures / Fadenspiele
A Research Exhibition

20 November 2024 – 9 March 2025

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, lengths 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.

#stringfigures

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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.

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

Suzanne Lacy

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, Zurich, photo: Antoine Drancey

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.