ZÜRICH.- For the first time, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst has commissioned an artist who works in the field of Socially Engaged Art – an artistic practice where artists collaborate with different groups of people to develop a project together to address contemporary concerns.

Stretching thresholds, holding streams

Jeanne van Heeswijk, the initiator of the project, and Sophie Mak-Schram have been in our museum, in the neighbourhood, and throughout the district (Zurich, Districts 5 and 4) since the beginning of the year. They first spent time with the museum and museum staff, as well as with collaborative practices and alternative / independent organisations in our surroundings.

This led to the question about the museum’s ‘thresholds’: what and how could people, ideas and objects enter or exit the museum? The project conceptualises this movement as ‘streams’ that flow in and out of the museum. The two artists work together with different ‘collaborators‘ – individuals and groups from our neighborhood. These collaborations will extend over the entire duration of the exhibition and take on very different formats, depending on the participants.

The weaving workshop of the St. Jakob Foundation will literally weave ‘streams‘ on site, which will be visible in the museum – supplemented by workshops for participation. A stream that will flow out of the museum will take place together with the feminist strike house Zurich: During tours of the district, participants will take a critical look at the development of the city and ask if it is there for everyone, whilst making a ‘city orchestra’ together. But streams will also flow from the museum on other media. There will be sound set up in the museum by a radio station, a stream will carry video content from the museum into the world. But also in reverse, streams flow into the museum: The organization Welcome to School (education for young adults with refugee experience) will conduct workshops in the museum and the Black Stammtisch (an event series in which people discuss their experiences of racism) will also take place in the museum. In addition, newly commissioned artworks will be on display.

Knowledge Is a Garden

‘Knowledge is like a garden: if it’s not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.’ Taking this West African proverb as its starting point, ‘Knowledge Is a Garden’ asks what possibilities arise if we understand knowledge that is supposedly fixed as something organic and growing.

In the exhibition Uriel Orlow explores what a garden of knowledge can be and what its cultivation and growth signify. In line with his interests the artist sets up a dialogue between his own works and those of the museum collection, which for their part raise questions around the production or suppression of knowledge. This selection is expanded by loans from Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Sammy Baloji, Zahra Malkani and Munem Wasif – artists who engage with suppressed history and traditional knowledge in their artistic practice.

‘Knowledge Is a Garden’ is an artistic engagement with the repression of knowledge, the unjust appropriation of knowledge, and ultimately with multiple forms of knowledge production. Knowledge does not consist of neutral facts and information, and is never all-encompassing. Rather, it is always situated, historical, and, above all, contested and vulnerable. The question of who gets to speak and whose voice is silenced is as urgent as ever – and marked by global inequality.

By extension, the exhibition encourages visitors to consider their own knowledge as a garden that must be cultivated.

With works by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Sammy Baloji, Lothar Baumgarten, Teresa Burga, Maria Eichhorn, Dani Gal, General Idea, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Eva Kot’átková, Susan Hiller, Zahra Malkani, Teresa Margolles, Senga Nengudi, Uriel Orlow, Elodie Pong, Ed Ruscha, Munem Wasif.