The end of the summer in Switzerland’s mountainous Grisons region is usually quiet. However, this year, the newly launched Engadin Art Weekend, the second annual St. Moritz Art Film Festival, a public art exhibition in the La Plaiv area, and exhibitions across its villages and valleys are turning it into a hot spot for art afficionados. Read on to discover what will be on view.
St. Moritz Art Film Festival
Scala, St. Moritz
August 31 to September 3, 2023
For more than 90 years, the Scala Cinema in St. Moritz has been on the cutting edge of film experiences in the Graubünden region. It now hosts the St. Moritz Art Film Festival, which features a curated selection of video works and experimental films and presents an award for the ‘Best Art Film’ along with a ‘Special Prize of the Jury’. For its second edition, titled ‘Becoming Landscape’, the festival will screen 20 films alongside a public program focused on themes of environmental, structural, and human-built atmospheres.
The festival has curated a selection that includes newcomers, familiar names, as well as classic works. Highlights include Julian Charrière’s short film Iroojrilik (2016), which captures the maritime ruins of Bikini Atoll’s atomic-industrial architecture. These impressive scenes are juxtaposed with tropical imagery, creating an enigmatic and liminal atmosphere to meditate on. Intimate portraits are part of the program as well, notably via artist and filmmaker duo Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine's Moriyama-San (2017), which explores domesticity. Premiering internationally, Edouard de Luze and Charles Derenne’s 24 Hour Sunset (2023) explores the Los Angeles art scene and its most intriguing protagonists, including Raymond Pettibon, Jill Mulleady, and Kenneth Anger. Closing the festival is Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson's film Spiral Jetty (1970), which features Smithson’s seminal earthwork of the same name and looks at landscape as a metaphor for beauty as well as its destructive tendencies.
‘Fabric Works’
Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz
Through September 9, 2023
Featuring works by Phyllida Barlow, Frank Bowling, Pipilotti Rist, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Piero Manzoni, and Fausto Melotti, this group show investigates how artists have used fabric in their practice – often combining it with materials more traditionally associated with the fine arts. The exhibited works create an overarching, subversive tension that not only carries the exhibition but makes their creators' talent evident as well. A wonderful example is Rist's Yayoi, die erleuchtete Enkelin (dunkelblau pink) (Familie Elektrobranche) (2022), in which a swimsuit was transformed into a domestic, lightweight, and potentially dangerous object.
Art Public Plaiv
La Plaiv region, Upper Engadin
The La Plaiv region is an area known as ‘the other Engadin.’ Its rugged wilderness and historical paths serve as the entry point to Switzerland's only national park. In 2001, a research project was conceived to bring together contemporary artworks and the rural landscape. In a collaboration between the Walter A. Bechtler Foundation, Zurich University of the Arts, and the municipalities of La Punt Chamues-ch, Madulain, Zuoz, and S-chanf, 12 artists were selected to create permanent to semi-permanent artworks in situ.
Scale is used to trick or confound passersby. Preeminent Swiss duo Fischli and Weiss’s mysterious and colorful Surrli (1989) can be seen at a bus stop in the village of S-chanf. Martin Kippenberger’s monumental Transportable Subway Entrance (1997) at the Zuoz-Madualin golf course is one of a series of entrance points for a fictional subway system that the artist placed throughout the world shortly before he died. Behind Hotel Castell in Zuoz, Roman Signer’s Wasserfenster (Water Window) (2011) invites you to step inside a metal cabinet for a framed view of Piz Messaun through a veil of falling water. Elsewhere at the Hotel Castell is the mirrored Red Bar (1997) designed by Pipilotti Rist and architect Gabrielle Hächler, while a Lawrence Weiner text work, BEFORE THE SUN RISES / HIDDEN FROM MOONLIGHT / LEFT IN THE WIND (1999), is hidden in plain sight along the wall of the south facade.
Engadin Art Weekend
September 1-3, 2023
The inaugural Engadin Art Weekend features several guided gallery and museum tours. Among the Friday evening openings is the solo exhibition ‘UNRUHE’ by the German artist Luise Unger at Galerie Karsten Greve in St. Moritz. Elsewhere, a visit to the villages of Ardez and Tarasp for a guided tour of the ‘Numbers’ group exhibition at Fundaziun Not Vital – which features works by Hanne Darboven, Jasper Johns, and On Kawara – is not be missed. Muzeum Susch will host a special Sunday brunch in honor of their Wanda Czełkowska retrospective, ‘Art is not Rest’.
Brit Barton is an artist and writer based in Zurich and Chicago.
St. Moritz Art Film Festival takes place from August 31 to September 3, 2023. All screenings will be held at Scala Cinema St. Moritz, Via Serlas 23, 7500 St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Engadin Art Weekend runs from September 1 to September 3, 2023.
Fischli/Weiss, Surrli (1989) is located in the former fire brigade garage at the Somvih bus stop, western village exit of S-chanf.
Martin Kippenberger, Transportable Subway Entrance (1997) can be found at the entrance of the Zuos-Madulain golf course.
A variety of public works, including Roman Signer, Wasserfenster (2011); Pipilotti Rist and Gabrielle Hächler, Red Bar (1997); and Lawrence Weiner, BEFORE THE SUN RISES / HIDDEN FROM MOONLIGHT / LEFT IN THE WIND (1999); can be found on the grounds of Hotel Castell at Via Castell 300, 7524 Zuoz, Switzerland.
Published on August 31, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Photograph by Engadin Art Weekend 2. Installation view, ‘Fabric Works’ at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. Works by Frank Bowling and Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Jon Etter.