WINTERTHUR.- The work of fully renovating Fotomuseum Winterthur is almost complete and the grand reopening of the museum is coming soon: Fotomuseum Winterthur will be welcoming visitors back in spring 2025! The opening exhibition The Lure of the Image is the first show on display in the new exhibition hall, which is connected to the building’s existing pent-roofed hall and offers space for various formats, some of them experimental. In addition to the exhibition, Fotomuseum Winterthur will be inaugurating the foyer’s inviting, brightly lit space, the new shop, the photo lab and the workshop and education rooms.

The Lure of the Image
17.05.–12.10.2025

The Lure of the Image explores the seductive powers of photographic images online. The exhibition maps the mechanisms of the lure and investigates how seduction and desire, affect and drive are embedded in contemporary visual culture.

Yet another image of a cat that makes you go . That TV show you love to hate that keeps popping up as a meme on social media. A picture that baits your click, a thirst trap you can’t resist. Political propaganda embedded in cuteness and the unfulfilled promises of perfect bodies on your dating app. One last Airbnb photograph that tricked you into a windowless trap. It’s hard not to get sucked into the world of digital images, a world that’s so beguiling that we can’t stop scrolling and just keep clicking.

How do images entice or beguile us, how do they control, bait or deceive us? What digital and networked logics underpin the persuasive attraction of images and what new forms of seduction have they spawned? The exhibition explores how images attract attention, evoke feelings, create desire and generate value. It also examines the complex social, political and economic networks in which the lure of the image is ultimately embedded. Selected positions from artists and photographers alongside commissioned works critically investigate, creatively subvert and actively resist the lure(s) of the image.

With works by: Zoé Aubry, Sara Bezovšek, Viktoria Binschtok, Sara Cwynar, Dina Kelberman, Michael Mandiberg, Joiri Minaya, Simone C. Niquille, Jenny Rova, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Timur Si-Qin, Noura Tafeche and Ellie Wyatt.

Poulomi Basu – Phantasmagorie
25.10.2025–15.02.2026

In her works, Indian artist Poulomi Basu (b. 1983) interweaves documentary photographs and staged scenes enacted in front of fantastical backdrops, creating multimedia, often large-scale installations. The title of the exhibition refers to the phantasmagorias of the 18th century, which captivated their audiences with projections and optical illusions. Basu also blurs the lines between imagination and reality: she drafts speculative visions of the future that simultaneously reflect the present of her protagonists and highlight possibilities for self-empowerment and resistance.

In addition to photography, the artist also employs virtual reality, film and performance in her transmedia practice, using the activist potential of the different media to champion the rights of marginalised groups.

Fotomuseum Winterthur is mounting the first major solo museum exhibition with the artist, showing a selection of her pieces. They are centred around the stories of women who, like her, come from the Global South and find themselves pushed to the margins of society. In Sisters of the Moon, for example, one of her most recent works, the artist uses fictionalised self-portraits set against dystopian landscapes to address the effects of water and resource scarcity on women. At the same time, she draws attention to the close intertwining of ecological and feminist issues. By staging herself as the protagonist in front of the camera, the artist shows solidarity with the women who have opened themselves up to her.

Basu’s works call for resistance to patriarchal structures, prevailing hierarchies and the systematic oppression of women and girls. The resilience of the protagonists in her works runs like a common thread through her images: the artist enables them to take on the role of empowered actors and to speak out, telling their personal stories and thus challenging audience perceptions.

Together – Kara Springer in Dialogue with the Collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur
25.10.2025–15.02.2026

Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting an innovative view of its collection through a dialogue set up between works by Kara Springer and pieces from the museum collection. In the exhibition space specific works are juxtaposed to reveal unexpected connections and productive contrasts. The interplay between Springer’s work and items from the collection unfolds on multiple levels, in a spatial experience that is informed by commonalities and differences at the level of content and aesthetics.

Springer – a Canadian artist with Caribbean roots (she was born in Barbados in 1980) – works with photography, sculpture and site-specific installations to explore architecture and urban infrastructure as well as the power structures they mirror. She is also interested in human interventions in nature and the influence that nature has on us in return, reflecting on how these forces interact with one another.

The museum’s new exhibition format, Together, is conceived as a series and seeks to energise the collection through a process of close collaboration with contemporary artists. Springer’s show is the first in the series – and her first exhibition in a Swiss institution. The collaboration thus presents an opportunity for visitors to encounter Springer’s diverse oeuvre while (re)discovering the museum’s own collection.