ZÜRICH.- Loving Shedhalle marks the 40th anniversary of Shedhalle Zurich art space in 2025 and encompasses the publication Loving Shedhalle—Resonance (book launch on November 20, 2025), a series of events titled Confluence, the online archives on loving.shedhalle.ch and the group exhibition Loving Shedhalle—Abundance.

The title Loving Shedhalle is obviously ambivalent: love promises closeness, connection, and solidarity, but at the same time makes us vulnerable and exploitable. As a feminist critique, it refers to unpaid care and reproductive work, which often remains invisible. At the same time, it emphasizes love as a practice that enables relationships and shapes the working methods of Shedhalle—yesterday, today, and in the future.

Loving Shedhalle—Abundance brings together fifteen artistic positions from the past forty years that are connected to Shedhalle in particular ways. The exhibition activates the archives of Shedhalle and is based on numerous conversations with people who have worked here. “Abundance” honors practices of relating and interweaving as an anti-heroic continuity of collective efforts that manifest themselves in repeated or continuous engagements with Shedhalle. The invited works and artistic practices support each other and form relations without diluting their own specificities.

With exuberant joy, Loving Shedhalle celebrates not only the archival holdings, but also the very existence of Shedhalle itself. The event series “Confluence”—with discussion rounds, guided tours, performances, concerts, listening sessions, communal meals, and workshops—creates contextualizing moments that bring together actors from different times.

The bilingual (German/English) publication Loving Shedhalle—Resonance, published by Scheidegger & Spiess provides insight into the research informing the activities accompanying the anniversary. With contributions by AKW, Sabian Baumann, Felix Brunner, Sønke Gau, Fred Hansen, Michael Hiltbrunner, Sylvia Kafehsy, Gülsün Karamustafa, Renate Lorenz, Maurice Maggi, Elke aus dem Moore, Katharina Morawek, Marion von Osten, Carla Peca, Katharina Schlieben, Nora Sternfeld and Lucie Tuma, the publication connects historical and contemporary voices, offering reflections on how art and society have been interrelated in specific historical situations.

The Shedhalle archives have been digitized in collaboration with the Swiss Social Archives especially for this anniversary and are now accessible. The online archives on the website loving.shedhalle.ch reveal traces of maintaining, preserving, and behind-the-scenes activities.

In activating and maintaining the archives, we ask ourselves: What can we learn from the past for the future—and for artistic work amidst hostile environments? Practices of study have always been important and diverse at Shedhalle. Expanded spaces of knowledge emerged in different media settings, materials and embodiments through the ages, forming an important layer in the history(ies) of the art space.

The entanglements between the exhibited artworks of Loving Shedhalle—Abundance from different eras of Shedhalle form a fabric of different threads, underpinned by an invisible yet effective layer: the concern. The German word for concern is Anliegen, derived from the Old High German Anliogan. It describes processes of approaching, snuggling up. Concerns refer to relationships, to contact, to the sensual, embodied, and lived dimension of artistic practice. They connect things, people, times.

Abundance works on the assumption that artistic and curatorial practices have been linked by related concerns, if not by kinship, over the decades. A common thread linking all those involved in Shedhalle may be the concern about the agencies of arts beyond the realm of art itself. The participating artists bear witness to this through the density of resonant spaces and related concerns across aesthetic means, formats and strategies.

Relating these concerns in a sensual and material way means keeping an eye on an abundance of possibilities and understanding difference not as a starting point for divisions and separability, but as a place from which relationships are formed. While celebrating the existence of this particular art space with Loving Shedhalle, we hope to hold space for similar and related venues, assembling and gathering transgenerational knowledges and practices, building resilience and solidarity for futures that cherish the niche, the yet to come and the unexpected.

With: Paloma Ayala, Sabian Baumann, Belliappa and Kumār, Ursula Biemann, Blablabor, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Donna Conlon, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri, Sylvie Fleury, Barbara Heé, Lang/Baumann, knowbotiq, Pipilotti Rist, Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv (RJSaK) Archive, Susanne Sauter.

Curated by Michael Hiltbrunner, Carla Peca, Lucie Tuma. Curatorial assistance Vanessa Bosch, David Dragan.