What material and social foundations do you rely on?
How do you relate to them?

Until the end of the 19th century, the location of Shedhalle was part of Lake Zurich. Shells, stones, algae, microorganisms and small fish used to populate this place. In the course of industrialization, the lakeshore here was expanded by artificial filling for the construction of this former silk weaving mill. Now you stand here, in a contemporary art space, on seemingly solid ground, and ProtoZone19: Ruptures \ Reliances symbolically lets the lake water flow back into the hall.

This ProtoZone is dedicated to instability and ruptures — as forms of historical continuity and crises in climate and politics. It invites visitors to delve into mutual reliances—both material and social—and to pursue solidarity-based ways of interacting. How can we understand instability as a starting point for changing relationships with our surroundings?

Involved with these notions, the practices of the invited artists find various approaches: Su Yu Hsin expands her research on water and its connection to ecology, industry, and technology to include the history of Shedhalle’s location.

Vika Kirchenbauer examines the emergence of modern art spaces between welfare and power politics in an essay performance video. Activist Choreographies of Care (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi and Sunny Pfalzer) bring the resistant and collective spirit of the perfocraZe International Artist Residency in Kumasi to Zurich for a day.

Göksu Kunak’s performative installation deals with a car accident that had a lasting impact on society and politics in Turkey. Layton Lachman’s performative practice invokes the ability to shift identities.

Omsk Social Club asks through Real Game Play what AI would be like if it were trained with radical care. And Bronwyn Katz’ sculptural and installative practice offers an alternative mode of preserving, reading and understanding ritual, language and the earth.

We invite you to become part of ProtoZone19 and move with us on unstable grounds.

Hi-Intensity-Phases

Friday, 23 May
open 17-22h
18:30 – Performance “In the Shadow of Forward Motion” by Layton Lachman

Sunday, 8 June
Activist Choreographies of Care (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi and Sunny Pfalzer)

Workshop, Performances, Screening Home is Resistance and Artist Talk (detailed program coming soon)

Zurich Art Weekend

Friday, 13 June
open 14-22h
20:30 – Performative Installation “tangerine” by Göksu Kunak

Saturday, 14 June
open 14-20h

Sunday, 15 June
open 12-18h
12:00–12:45 – Book Launch by Vika Kirchenbauer (at Löwenbräu )
14:15–15:15 – Live Research “Water: A Geoarchive” by Su Yu Hsin at Shedhalle

Lo-Intensity Phase

REGULAR OPENING HOURS
24 May – 03 August
open every Saturday 14-20h / every Sunday 14-18h

++ Interested in participating in the playtesting of “OUR BR00D” by Omsk Social Club? Please get in touch via mail@shedhalle.ch – we will update you on the dates and times. Thank you!

A drift into the increasingly unknown, Protozone18: Unfamiliar Evermore occupies a space between recognition and estrangement, fantasy and absurdity — being both in the moment and outside of time. Our present is fracturing, and here, at Shedhalle, the Protozone Series is coming to an end. We want to sit with this moment, with both its precarity and fantasy, not knowing what will come next.

As the fifth and last Protozone curated by Michelangelo Miccolis, Unfamiliar Evermore is a loving farewell, a multi-format program including performance, film, installation and conversation. The program shifts from high to low intensity, unfolding as a living process of exhibition-making and collaborative exchange, while tending to the evolution of relationships and working processes.

The artistic processes in Protozone18 are rooted in performance and adopt film as one of its extensions. Through acts of speech, movement, and exchange, the participating artists engage in practices of resistance, refuge, and invention. They dismantle and reassemble language through utterance and gesture, allowing it to reflect the contexts we inhabit while opening up alternative possibilities. Language, or its lack, becomes a tool to resist entrenched norms, proposing new systems of meaning and interaction.

Ivan Cheng, Kris Lemsalu and Joanna Ulfsak focus on personal identity, autonomy, and representation, presenting works that amplify the performative construction of the self, to challenge traditional notions of authenticity and blur the boundaries between reality and performance.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Army of Love (Ingo Niermann + Frédérique Vivet), and Eglė Budvytytė emphasize collective practices that reimagine community within artistic, social, as well as posthuman frameworks. Encounters play a central role in these works, not only between artists but with participants or the natural environment as well. These projects evolve through workshops, collective practices and symbiosis, inviting audiences or the environment to actively shape the collaborative processes at play.

This program reflects our ongoing commitment to collaboration and the exploration of new artistic frameworks even and especially when the future is unknown and the present feels unfamiliar.

PROGRAM

LAST DAYS!
open 03.05. 14-20h / 04.05. 14-18h / 10.05. 14-22h / 11.05. 14-18h

Saturday, 10.05.

20:00 Music-Performance by Furtherset

Lo-Intensity
Sunday, 16 March to Sunday, 11 May
open every Saturday 14-20h & every Sunday 14-18h

The artistic processes in Protozone18 are rooted in performance and adopt film as one of its extensions. Video-installations related to the performances will remain in the space throughout the Lo-Intensity Phase until 11th of May.

PAST

Hi-Intensity
Friday, 14 March
open 18-22h

18:00 Screening Eglė Budvytytė, Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2022)

19:00 Performance Ivan Cheng: Nowadays (2025)

20:00 Performance Kris Lemsalu & Gregor Kulla: Old Piano (2024)

Saturday, 15 March
open 14-20h

14:00 Screening Eglė Budvytytė, Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (2022)

14:30 Film Premiere Ingo Niermann & Frédérique Vivet, Falling in Love with the World (2025)

17:00 Talk with Louise O’Kelly & Michelangelo Miccolis

18:00 Performance/Sharing by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

19:00 Screening: Inchoate Buzz (2022), a film by Leah Walker, conceived and commissioned by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome