2013

The Audiolab project is a coming together of architecture and sound design. The long collective process – involving the talents of four designers and a diversified medley of musicians, sound artists and engineers – gathers design, music and art into an experience that works on many levels. Audiolab 2 was created by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, two designers who also designed the structure of Mudam Café.

Andres Lutz, also cabaret artist, and Anders Guggisberg, musician, have worked together as an artistic duo since 1996, creating a wide variety of works. Their repertoire includes not only paintings, sculptures, installations, video and photography, but also performances and their constantly growing fake library. Based in Zurich, Lutz & Guggisberg are rooted in the tradition of Dadaism, which was invented in the city, and the work of another famous Zurich artistic duo, Fischli/Weiss.

Created using humble materials from traditional sculpture or found in the everyday environment, such as wood, clay, plaster, glass, fabrics and steel, Thea Djordjadze’s sculptures and installations are characterised by their fragile, temporary and transitory nature. Seemingly produced on the spur of the moment – the artist likes to keep her works open, and often finalises them when installing the exhibition –, they are a crystallisation of both the process of their production and their possible alteration through time.

The phantasmagorical work of the austrian artist, Elmar Trenkwalder, celebrates the exalted and hallucinated part of the human spirit. Referring to the tradition of sexual transgression developed by the Viennese Actionists, it is also reminiscent of a fantastical medieval era, as well as of the grotesque style. Moved by an erotic and vital energy, this audacious project appears to arise from obsessive visions of magical forms.

Chen Chieh-jen, foremost figure of the Taiwanese art scene, makes movies on political and social matters, mainly focusing on the conditions of life of marginalised populations. For his last film, Happiness Building I (2012), the artist paid a more particular attention to the “internal exiled people”, as he described them, of the economic policy of Taiwan. The exhibition of Chen Chieh-jen at Mudam will allow the European audience to discover some of the last movies of the artist.

The exhibition J’ouvre les yeux et tu es là (I open my eyes and you are there) gathers about fifteen artworks from the Mudam Collection, including several recent acquisitions. The works show the fragile movement of appearing and disappearing images: ephemeral shadow images, the appearance of an image on a sheet of paper or a canvas, the reflection, the projection, the inception of mental images... The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a painting by Rémy Zaugg, who questions our gaze, appearance and invisibility.

Within the framework of the fourth edition of European Month of Photography, which begins on 24 April 2013, Mudam in collaboration with Café Crème presents the multimedia installation POPPY – Trails of Afghan Heroin by Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong. By highlighting the dark and complex side of globalization, this multimedia installation thus exposes the context and consequences of the shipment of heroin from East to West, by revealing along the way conflicts, diseases, and crimes as well as the extreme poverty that afflicts these countries.

Inspired by the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald, the exhibition L’Image papillon (The Butterfly Image) addresses the complex relations that link image and memory. It gathers sixteen artists whose work, like Sebald’s, explores the realms of memory and history. Borrowing its title from an essay on Sebald’s work by Muriel Pic, the exhibition uses the figure of the ‘butterfly image’ to examine the questions this kind of relation to the past asks in the context of the visual arts.

At first glance, the three-dimensional pictures by the Dutch artist Folkert de Jong appear seductive and disturbing in equal measure. De Jong generally turns the exhibition space into a theatre stage, for which he designs sceneries made, with great virtuosity, from polyurethane foam, an unusual material in sculpture. Often inspired by historic facts, real persons or memorable episodes from art history, his works unfold in complex compositions that confront the viewer with extremely tangible directness.

The Mudam Collection grows steadily with the years and presently counts over 550 works. About twenty works are presented in a permanent way in the museum and the park, whereas temporary exhibitions allow the visitors to regularly discover diverse pieces from the collection. With Unrooted Tree (Arbre sans racines) ou la Machine à faire parler les arbres, Mudam exhibits a work form the french artists duo Art Orienté Objet which recently entered the collection.

Looks Like Music is an installation by Yuri Suzuki centered around his sound piece Colour Chaser: a miniature robot that detects and follows a black line while reading crossing coloured lines and translating this data into sound. Visitors are free to draw on paper and simultaneously compose music, thus creating a large scale picture and a sound piece at the same time.

The Mudam Collection grows steadily with the years and presently counts over 550 works. About twenty works are presented in a permanent way in the museum and the park, whereas temporary exhibitions allow the visitors to regularly discover diverse pieces from the collection. The Audiolab project gathers design, music and art into an experience that works on many levels.