What is the state of contemporary art in Geneva, a city at the core of a transnational urban area with more than a million residents? In previous years, Geneva often sold itself short, with a series of delayed or canceled plans like the Jean Nouvel project for the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (MAH) in 2016 and the Cité de la Musique in 2021. But today, things are looking up, and despite the closing of a few galleries during the pandemic and in its aftermath, there is good cause to hope for a resurgence of the local art scene. To lead the way, the city’s public museums will be considerably revamped by 2030, with an upcoming design competition to redo the MAH and a planned redevelopment, scheduled for 2025-2026, of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and the Centre de la Photographie. Geneva today is a work in progress. And this is nicely echoed in the events it has planned for late January.
Coinciding with artgenève (January 26–29), two major exhibitions are set to open this month. One is at the MAH, an institution only partially devoted to contemporary art, even though Marc-Olivier Wahler, its director since 2020, is a leading figure in the field. Wahler, who previously directed the Swiss Institute New York, brings a many-faceted contemporary vision to a vast, eclectic collection that has too seldom seen the light of day. Following the Viennese artist Jakob Lena Knebl and the French curator Jean-Hubert Martin, it is now the turn of Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone to enjoy carte-blanche to curate a show of the museum’s collections. (Fittingly, Rondinone’s first guest curation was also at the invitation of Wahler, when he staged the hit exhibition ‘The Third Mind’ at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2007).
For ‘When the Sun Goes Down and the Moon Comes Up’, Rondinone has gathered more than 500 objects from the approximately 650,000 pieces in the MAH’s permanent collection, which spans archaeology, fine arts, and crafts. The show creates a narrative journey that also includes works by Rondinone himself and gives star billing to another Swiss artist who achieved international renown, Félix Vallotton.
At the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Andrea Bellini (who will curate the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024) will inaugurate his second collaboration with the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne. Following a fascinating exhibition on writing in 2020, this new venture, titled ‘Chrysalis: The Butterfly’s Dream’, brings together around 60 artists – including Ataa Oko, Grisélidis Réal, Marianna Simnett, Sin Wai Kin, and Kaari Upson – and more than 200 works, all linked to the idea of transformation. The exhibition is accompanied by a program of performances, films, and concerts.
In the same building, the Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain (BAC), one can currently catch the final days of MAMCO’s exhibition of work by the Italian artist Laura Grisi (1939–2017). Indeed Grisi’s exhibition is a fine example of the resolutely historical approach taken by MAMCO director Lionel Bovier, who will soon inaugurate an exhibition of drawings by the Canadian collective General Idea and the multifaceted works of the Australian artist, Ian Burn. The museum has thus developed a vision in keeping with its founder Christian Bernard, but with a greater emphasis on historical exhibits and a more international scope.
Following a research project codirected with HEAD–Genève (2016–2019), MAMCO is also home to the Ecart Archives, which give testament to the great creative freedom of this collective, created in 1969 in close proximity with Fluxus, which brought together a group of artists, an independent art space, and a publishing house. John M. Armleder, Ecart’s central – but not domineering, – figure, has constantly worked to instill this spirit of freedom in all those he has collaborated with, in Geneva and elsewhere.
Three institutions – MAMCO, the Centre d’Art Contemporain, and the Centre pour la Photographie – now share the space at BAC with a more united dynamic than ever before. Designed in the 1990s for the inception of MAMCO in 1994, the building had a complicated start. Last year saw the inauguration of the AGORA, a space where Bovier displays works from the collection of the city of Geneva, a kind of test-ground while awaiting the planned renovations.
With these prospects on the horizon, Danaé Panchaud, who was once a young collaborator at the Centre d’Art Contemporain and more recently director of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, has returned to Geneva. As Director of the Centre de la Photographie since January 2021, she has promoted a highly refined vision of photography that nevertheless draws broad media coverage. Her exhibition program explores themes of power, control, and emancipation. This spring, Geneva-based Anastasia Mityukova’s reflections on Western depictions of the far north will follow Switzerland-based German-Ghanian photographer Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah’s complex documentary project on scientific expeditions in Patagonia. With these, Panchaud has injected even more energy into a scene that has flourished in Geneva through the efforts of the city’s cultural counselor Sami Kanaan, including the creation of the Nuit de la Photo and the funding of photography grants.
All three institutions housed in the Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain will be at artgenève this year, where the booths of the city’s museums, schools, and independent art spaces (along with guests from abroad, such as the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, Serpentine Galleries, London, and Villa Arson, Nice, France) stand side by side with those of commercial galleries. All of the top Genevan galleries will be present, of course, alongside a number of their internationally renowned peers.
In the districts of Vieille Ville, Carouge, and particularly the neighborhood around the BAC, gallerists open their shows simultaneously. Joint openings have been held there since the early 2000s under the banner of the Quartier des Bains association (which takes its name from the neighborhood’s principal street). Of course, some of the early enthusiasm has faded, as Skopia’s Pierre-Henri Jaccaud, one of the association’s founders, confirms. The number of gallerists has dwindled by more than half (eight galleries remain today) and they all know they will have to hold strong during the work on the BAC, as they depend on the same synergy between museums and galleries that one finds at artgenève.
Confidence remains high, however, with the recent arrival of a new gallery set up by Olivier Varenne, who has come to join such names as Wilde, Xippas, and Galerie Mezzanin. And, even if some of the young collectors active in the early 2000s were not able to weather the economic crises that followed, there remains a constant and diverse pool of buyers, constantly enriched with new arrivals (the turnover rate of the Genevan population is higher than 10% per year).
The liveliness of the Quartier des Bains (Geneva’s former industrial district), also owes much to non-commercial sites like the Centre d’Édition Contemporaine and Andata . Ritorno, two classic Genevan independent spaces. Just down the street, Forde, founded as part of L’Usine in 1994, remains a formative place for many artists and curators. In the years since then, the city has witnessed the birth of Le Labo, Hit, Zabriskie Point, one gee in fog, and the Usine Kugler: Fédération des Artists de Kugler (FAK), in addition to residencies like Utopiana and The Embassy of Foreign Artists and, even more recently, Espace 3353 in Carouge and Cherish in Petit-Lancy.
The latter, Cherish, is still living on borrowed time in a building scheduled for demolition. One of its founders is the artist and curator Mohamed Almusibli, a cocurator of the 2021 ‘Lemaniana: Reflections on Other Scenes’ project at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, which shed light on young artists from the region. Almusibli himself is representative of a generation that studied at HEAD–Genève and elsewhere, is often steeped in several cultures, and has cast a generous and uninhibited eye upon what goes on in the region, all the while contributing to the international scope of these conversations and exchanges.
It would be impossible to speak of contemporary art in Geneva without connecting it to the rise of HEAD–Genève during the 19 years Jean-Pierre Greff held the role of director, before his recent retirement. This prestigious art school – more and more international in scope, like its home city – has trained artists, designers, and curators untroubled by the old local inhibitions. Several former students (Agapornis, Marlène Charpentié, Zahra Hakim) are currently participating in the second edition of Art au Centre de Genève. This project, first created to counter the effects of the pandemic, now offers the wider public access to contemporary art, with 10 curators exhibiting 20 artists for three months in the – often large – shop windows offered by local businesses.
The project is run by Carole Rigaut, director of Halle Nord, an art space in Geneva where she has been championing local contemporary artists since 2006. Rigaut is also one of the founders of the Biennale des Espaces d’Art Indépendants de Genève (BIG), a must-see event for anyone looking for the heart of alternative, emerging Geneva. The next edition will take place this summer, just near the water in La Perle du Lac park.
For the flaneur – or flaneuse – Geneva offers an array of public art largely developed thanks to the Fonds Municipal et Cantonal d’Art Contemporain. ‘Art&Tram’, installed along tramline 14 (home to Pipilotti Rist’s pink tram), will soon unveil its latest piece, Beautiful Bridge (2023), by the artist duo L/B. ‘Mire’, a program of video works presented in the new train stations of Léman Express, is perhaps more discrete, but no less remarkable. And don’t forget to look up when walking through the Plainpalais esplanade, to see the rooftop works of ‘Neon Parallax’, curated by Simon Lamunière, and on show since 2006. The two most recent pieces, by Olaf Nicolai and Nathalie Du Pasquier, were inaugurated in 2022.
Geneva is creating a new identity for itself. While certain people are taken aback by these recent and upcoming developments, others are lending a hand to shape this new atmosphere – a place for people who like surprises and prefer to be delighted, not overawed.
Elisabeth Chardon is the co-editor of the quarterly publication La Couleur des jours. She was also the editor in charge of visual arts at the Swiss daily broadsheet Le Temps, with which she still collaborates.
English translation: Peter Behrman de Senety.
All photos and videos by Matthieu Croizier for Art Basel.
Published on January 26, 2023.