Leihgaben Und Schenkungen

Longterm loan of the documenta fifteen installation rasad to the Kunsthaus Zürich, enabled and organized by TheArtists in 2023.

At documenta fifteen, Britto created a vivid interconnected landscape devoted to food politics, displacement, and culture. The first was an organic palan—a Bengali kitchen garden—which feeds the pak ghor, the family kitchen-cum-living room. In Kassel, Britto’s pak gor served food and gathered people from its immigrant population, who prepared meals, shared their histories, memories, and hosted events, presenting the food cultures of 100 nationalities in 100 days.

In the large-scale installation rasad (2022), Britto has recreated a small-town bazaar stocked with food items in crochet, ceramic, metal, or embroidery, produced collaboratively through workshops in Dhaka in 2021.

Britto Arts Trust is an artist-run non-profit collective founded in 2002. As part of the Triangle Network, an international network of artists and visual arts organizations, it has a global reach.

Support in the acquisition of a part of the installation to the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2023.

Raphael Hefti's work Message Not Sent (2020-2023) transforms invisible noble gases into vibrant plays of colour. Oversized test tubes bring helium, neon and more to glowing life, revealing a world of wonder.

The Swiss artist Raphael Heft is developing his research through an intimate relationship with industrial processes involving the manipulation of matter, positioning himself, with a playful approach in well-defined and schematic production patterns.

Message Not Sent is a capsule of chances. A magical, still finely tuned, partially controlled event. The artist has filled 4 metre long glass cylinders with mixtures of various noble gases; under electrical voltage, the particles of the gases begin to glow. As pure elements Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton and Xenon are as old as the universe - stardust - and equally part of our atmosphere composing the air we breathe. Engaging in an almost alchemical process of mixing in which pressure and energy interfere on the visual output, these underglass auroras change in intensity and color just as celestial bodies.
The glowing noble gases nestle within their glass vessel, weightlessly hanging, dancing in still yet kinetic sculptures. Inside their tubes slices of the material of the sun are forming the body of a message, of thoughts never said. Through electrical current, the noble gases reveal their voice, a hum that swells up and down, trembling, constantly oscillating in their various frequencies.
Message Not Sent is like a prism that allows us to perceive and marvel at the world and its elements in a new way. The work tells of stars as flickering balls of gas, of distance measured in the speed of light and the sound of our voices that spreads in waves. (Text Kunsthaus Zürich)

The installation Message Not Sent was originally shown at Kunsthalle Basel in Raphael Hefti’s solo exhibition «Salutary Failures» (9.10.2020–3.1.2021). It has also been exhibited at Kunsthaus Zürich (14 December 2023 – mid February 2024).

Donation of the wallpaper and a work on paper (2.2.1861, 2009) to the Kunsthaus Zürich, enabled by TheArtists in 2021.

In his work, Danh Vō often interweaves his personal history with global political events - here he deals with the presence of the former colonial power France in Southeast Asia. The delicate pale red plants on the wallpaper are plant species collected by the French missionary and botanist Jean-André Soulié (1858-1905) and given Latin names. He often used his own name as a designation (e.g. ‘Lilium souliei’) and thus appropriated the native flora in a classic colonial manner. Like Soulié, Théophane Vénard (1829-1861) was also a missionary in Vietnam and was executed there for illegal missionary activities. In a final letter to his father, he describes man as a flower that will eventually be plucked by God. Vō asked his own father to make a handwritten copy of the letter. Vō's father does not speak French, but is a master of calligraphy. Here, Vō sheds a multi-layered light on the question of legacy and transience against the backdrop of colonial entanglements.

Donation of three works of the series Holiday Paintings to the Kunsthaus Zürich, enabled by TheArtists in 2021.

«We sometimes forget the obvious. Being original is almost impossible. What matters is what's inside,» the artist recommends for the interpretation of his art. 'Holiday' has become a social convention that was established in the course of labor law regulations after the First World War and helped to establish the phenomenon of mass tourism after the Second in times of the economic miracle. The consequences of this development in the welfare states are only now, triggered by the Airline Deregulation Act (1978) and the accompanying spread of low-cost airlines, becoming apparent in all their problems. Although cheap flights and all-inclusive offers can be understood as part of a leisure industry that provides social equalization in the name of mass consumption, we are fighting an increasingly hopeless battle with the devastating effects of tourism on the environment. The series also engages in a kind of sales pitch to the art public, with the price of the painting appearing as the motif of that very painting (although here too, as in package tourism, dumping prices are called for). In the possibility of acquiring the painting for the same price as the price painted on it, Monk raises the question with a wink as to whether a trip or the idea of it is "worth it". (Text by Cathérine Hug)