LUCERNE.- Last year, the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern awarded the Solo exhibition prize to Teo Petruzzi (*1994). Petruzzi’s work includes video, installation and performance art. Petruzzi’s artistic studies scru- tinise social norms and systems. At the centre of Petruzzi’s first institutional solo exhibition is the video installation Der sichere Hafen (The safe haven), which takes a humorously critical look at the Swiss National Bank.

The Swiss National Bank is an institution that is known to many, yet understood by only a few. Thick walls protect it against inquisitive eyes, and access is only granted to a small circle of people. It safeguards the Swiss state assets and harbours a broad knowledge of economics.

Petruzzi’s work is intended to both explain the mechanisms of the Swiss National Bank and point up its questionable investments, and also to examine in detail its resistance to reform. To facilitate this approach, Petruzzi deliberately adopts a very particular narrative perspective: that of a toilet bowl in the men’s restrooms at the Swiss National Bank.

Petruzzi’s expansive video installation grants viewers a look into a toilet cubicle. The toilet bowl speaks—in the form of a monologue, and despite its obligation to be discrete—about small and large-scale business, that is to say, about the “clean, discrete and efficient liquidation of emis- sions”. It reveals intimate views of the internal world of the National Bank and defends the values of the capitalist market economy. Along the way, the hegemonic structures and the reti- cence of the banking system are questioned. For the script, Petruzzi worked closely with the economist and business journalist Fabio Canetg and the comedian Johannes Dullin, who also lends his voice to the toilet bowl; the urinal is voiced by Azur Gosteli.

The toilet is an artistic motif that recurs throughout art history: Marcel Duchamp’s upturned urinal called Fountain (1917) is regarded as an icon of “anti-art” and was reinterpreted in bronze by Sherrie Levine as Fountain (Buddha) in 1991. Maurizio Cattelan’s publicly accessible toilet made of 18-carat gold America (2016), Luis Buñuel’s film Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974) and Alexey Gerasimov’s satirical YouTube-series Skibidi Toilet (since 2023) take the toilet (or urinal) as a point of departure for critical engagements with society and culture.

The toilet in Der sichere Hafen can also be understood as standing for Switzerland. With this work Petruzzi points up the injustices in a country that under the guise of “neutrality” provides a quiet, secretive and discreet service—disposing of the world’s dirty business.

In the context of the Solo exhibition and complementing the work Der sichere Hafen the edition Pocket Change will be issued, consisting of printed Lego bricks, the design of which references the current Swiss banknotes. The edition can be bought in the museum shop during the course of the exhibition.

Curated by Milena von Schulthess