Proto-zones2020-2025
Shedhalle as a space for process-based art
Processes are a tool to open up unknown spaces of thinking and action. It is at the core of our work. We continue a history that allowed authority to be transferred from artists and institutions to the audience. Art takes part in the creation of actual communities.
The world is shifting, and art institutions are charged with negotiating social questions. Hence platforms, which dynamically promote social, technological and ecological change are increasingly important.
Essential issues converge in the cultural sector: debates around the inability to act politically, the empowerment of previously marginalised groups, and ecological sustainability. Museums, festivals, and theatres are laboratories for change and testing grounds for utopias. In this, we see the purpose of Shedhalle, and we respond to the need for new strategies of exhibition-making.
The idea behind process-based art begins with experimentations in the middle of the 20th century, i.e. the era when genres were dissolved in favour of a new conception of art. The genesis of the work was just as important as the final product—if not more so. Painters staged themselves in the process, sculptures became polyvalent entities, theatre approached performance art and the other way around.
The new definition of the artwork has left its mark on theatre and on music, and the integration of different media is by now a standard procedure of contemporary art. However, the permeability of works and disciplines cannot be told as a simple story of progress, much less as a neatly defined narrative, because it is due to much larger social, political, and cultural changes.
The Protozone as a format for process-based art
To consciously incorporate this thought in an art institution, we developed a new format: the Protozone. It gives space to collaboration and to exhibitions, whose openness is still visible. The Protozone can accommodate any form of art, and it gives room for workshops and scholarship, which in turn engage in a process with other elements in the zone.
The Protozones at Shedhalle are designed to be inclusive, and they enable the collaboration of artists and people with different backgrounds. They allow for slow and persistent action, they create a space where processes can unfold.
Shedhalle and its Protozones are places for unconventional practices and for experiments. They give a platform to artists who work in different disciplines, and whose complex biographies and identities we want to accommodate. We perceive the Protozone as a starting point for a community of artists and activists who do not conform to the demands of the art market.
Each year, there are four Protozones. They have their own topics and follow their own rules. They are subdivided into two phases. The first phase lasts from a few days up to a week, and it is supposed to initiate artistic processes and to activate installations and works. The house stays open during this time, the artists are present, existing artworks and situations are being presented and developed, new ones are being produced. The practice itself becomes visible.
In terms of intensity and immersion, the first week resembles an exhibition that has been opened too early. The second week recalls a conventional presentation, which is accompanied by a programme of events. In addition, each Protozone leaves something. Artefacts and texts will be preserved in the freely accessible archive of the Shedhalle.
The term Protozone has a twofold origin. The Greek prefix proto- signifies a preliminary or an early stage. Phonetically, the word recalls the protozoon—Greek for “the first animal”—a single cell organism that carries the potential of future evolution.
Another association is the zone, which is, beyond urbanism and land use, a recurring concept in science fiction. Zones, in this context, are frequently areas with rules of their own, where utopia seems possible.
Collaboration
The Protozone is not purely speculative. It is a means of anchoring the idea of process in the institution itself. Besides cooperations with international artists, we collaborate with artists from all parts of Switzerland, local initiatives and institutions—including the fields of technology, science, and activism—to connect our activities to the immediate surroundings.
With this, we continue Shedhalle’s history. The institution has its origin in historical struggles for autonomous spaces in Zurich. Our aims include the coexistence in a post-migrant, open society, as well as ecological sustainability, in order to continue the negotiation of social and artistic processes.
Team
Managing Direction:
Miriam Haltiner
Artistic Direction:
Thea Reifler
Philipp Bergmann
Curatorial Board:
Isabelle Vuong
Lucie Tuma
Michelangelo Miccolis
Executive Board Shedhalle:
Siri Peyer
Sarah Mehler
Dominique Jud
Rahel El-Maawi
Theresa Chen (president)
Marcel Bleuler
Barbara Basting
Communication:
Ann Mbuti
Curatorial Assistant:
Lena Pfäffli
Accounting:
Sara Gasteiger
Supervising:
Paloma Ayala
Isabella Girtanner
Andreas Kleemann
et al.
Association
If you join our association as a member or patron, you support us financially and ideally. In order to realize our events, exhibitions and external projects, we are dependent on private financing. The contributions of our members and patrons cover an important part of our project expenses.
As a member you receive:
Free entrance to all exhibitions and events of Shedhalle
Participation and voting rights at the general meeting
Free admission to more than 15 Swiss art institutions
Invitations and information about the exhibitions and member events
Discounts on publications of Shedhalle
We ask for your opinion
You support contemporary art <3
Annual contribution:
Private persons CHF 40.-/
for free for under 18 years old
Hi-story
Shedhalle on the premises of Rote Fabrik
Rote Fabrik was built in 1892 as a mechanical silk weaving mill. As was usual for industrial buildings of the time, sawtooth roofs (so-called shed roofs according to the English shed patent) provided the necessary daylight for the production halls.
After several changes of ownership* and temporary vacancies, the city of Zurich acquired Rote Fabrik in 1972 with the plan to widen the adjacent Seestrasse after demolition of the buildings. However, the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Democratic Party successfully intervened against these plans with a popular initiative. The factory was to be preserved. In 1977, the voters commissioned the city council to draw up a proposal for the use of the Rote Fabrik as a cultural and leisure center. Three years later, youth unrest accelerated the creation of the alternative cultural center “Rote Fabrik”.
The exhibition space Shedhalle was founded in 1985 by Trakt B, the association of artists with studios in the Rote Fabrik, which was founded in 1982. As local artists they were underrepresented in the established art system. By winning the vote for the Rote Fabrik as a cultural centre at the end of 1987, the city made independence a condition, which is why the Shedhalle Association was founded in the spring of 1988 and established permanent positions for curators and management.
Programmatics
At the beginning of 1994 there was a fundamental revision of the programmatic concept of Shedhalle. The overriding goal of this revision was to open the program to more unconventional forms of art education and to interdisciplinary cooperation with other social and scientific organizations.
In order to do justice to this goal, the team was to be composed of staff members who had already worked at the interface between art, discursive procedures and political commitment. Within the framework of a communicative and egalitarian working philosophy, the curatorial team was involved in operational matters and the management in curatorial matters. Furthermore, the curatorial team was staffed with two to three curators of equal standing working collectively.
Curatorial Practice
In order to pave the way for a different exhibition practice, Shedhalle had to become a place where not only the products but also their working and exchange relationships in which they are created are shown. This implied that the examination of the political conditions and circumstances of art production and reception became an integral part of the work in Shedhalle.
The aim was to examine the conventional concept of art and to counter it with alternatives. Thus, the exhibition “Nature™” (1995) was staged as a sales fair where artistic, social and political projects – which emancipatorily deal with so-called New Technologies – could be presented. Or in a project on pornography and prostitution, “Gewerbeschein Künstlerin” (1995), which was dedicated to the connection between commercial advertising strategies and pornography/
Shedhalle succeeded in attracting great international attention with its program and became an important reference point for an experimental, socio-critical, contemporary art practice.
Shedhalle and Rote Fabrik have always been places for processes that have bundled the city’s potential to enable new artistic formats as well as social forms. With the new artistic orientation 2020-2025, the Shedhalle is to become a space for process-based art in Zurich and Switzerland.
Previous
Curators:
Guest Curators
(1985 – 1986)
Luigi Kurmann
(1986 – 1987)
Harm Lux
(1988 – 1993)
Renate Lorenz
(1994 – 1997)
Sylvia Kafehsy
(1994 – 1997)
Marion von Osten
(1996 – 1998)
Ursula Biemann
(1995 – 1998)
Justin Hoffmann
(1997 – 2000)
Elke aus dem Moore
(1999 – 2002)
Frederikke Hansen
(2000 – 2004)
Sønke Gau
(2004 – 2009)
Katharina Schlieben
(2004 – 2009)
Anke Hoffmann
(2009 – 2012)
Yvonne Volkart
(2009 – 2012)
Can Gülcü
(2012 – 2014)
Katharina Morawek
(2012 – 2017)
Egija Inzule
(2017-2018)
Annette Amberg
(2017 – 2018)
Paolo Do
(2017 – 2018)
Salvatore Lacagnina
(2017 – 2018)
Adriana Lara
(2017 – 2018)
Mirjam Bayerdörfer
(2019-2020)
Franz Krähenbühl
(2019-2020)
Ren-ting
You can rent Shedhalle for non-public events like seminars, workshops, small celebrations and gatherings. Available dates are throughout the months of December and January, but sometimes also at other times of the year.
Please contact us for detailed information.
Archive
A trip from the 80s to today…
The Shedhalle archive and a library are physically located in Shedhalle. For the archive, a cooperation with the Swiss Social Archive in Zurich was agreed upon. The archive holdings will be successively digitised and transferred to the Social Archive over the next few years. The library will remain in the Shedhalle and will be made accessible there again.
A visit is possible at any time – please contact us here.
An overview of the material and access to past websites is to be found in the online-catalogue.
Bookyourartist!
Coming soon!
A project by Shedhalle Zürich in collaboration with La rada – spazio per l’arte contemporanea Locarno and other interested partners across Switzerland.
Book your artist! is an online platform that connects young artists from any field with local audiences through personal encounters.
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NileKoetting
Remain Calm
(Reduced +)
“Remain Calm” by artist Nile Koetting invites audiences into an ever-evolving space of installation, performance, sound, light, scents, as well as texts written by author and researcher Miriam Stoney.
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16-22hno reservation needed
10-18hno reservation needed
10-17h no reservation needed followed by a Talk with Nile Koetting, Miriam Stoney, Marcella Lista (Head Curator, Video & New Media Collection, Musée national d’art moderne – centre Pompidou, Paris (online)), Lhaga Koondhor (cultural curator), Philipp Bergmann & Thea Reifler (members curatorial team Shedhalle), about the process of ‚Remain Calm‘ RSVP
LillyPfalzer
Gangs of performative activism
Gangs of performative Activism focuses on performative strategies in activism historically and in the present and on the question through which embodied experiences a community can form.
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23.09.202016-17:30 public lecture “performative strategies in activism”
24.09.202014-17 Researching with the whole body –
Alternative research tools and poetic political writing practices
25.09.202014-17 Embodied performative strategies of activism:
Giving up the individual and moving as a communal body
26.09.202014-17 Exploring your body in the public space and cuddling in the street
Please register for the workshop here!
IsabelLewis
Erotic Sociability
In this workshop Isabel Lewis shares ideas around sociality and embodiment. No formal training of any kind is required to participate and all adults with a curiosity about dance and other embodied practices are encouraged to attend.
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Please register for the workshop here!
With this workshop, Shedhalle takes part in the Fleshy Interface Festival, initiated by Theater Neumarkt. Check the full program here
LillyPfalzer
Practice
Collective Meddling
How to intervene when witnessing sexual and racial discrimination in public space? The workshop aims to prepare its participants to meddle in and become an ally in delicate situations.
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Please register for the workshop here!
With this workshop, Shedhalle takes part in the Fleshy Interface Festival, initiated by Theater Neumarkt. Check the full program here
CivicForum forArtWorkers
Kunstarbeiter*innen Solidaritätsverein invites you to the inaugural Civic Forum for Art Workers. The Forum brings together artists to help build and occupy a liminal social space where we will embody new perspectives for renegotiating our interactions as art workers
Join us:
Saturday, 3 October 14:00 – 18:00 Longtang
Sunday, 4 October 14:00 – 18:00 Shedhalle
Please bring a mask. Space is limited. Please register to reserve your spot:
register@civicforumforartworkers.live
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Protozones2020-2025media-conference
With PROTOZONES 2020-2025, everything at Shedhalle will revolve around process-based art in the coming years. What this means in detail and which formats will be created as a result is to be discovered over the next few years. We cordially invite you to be part of this process and look forward to meeting you at the media conference on 19 October 2020 at 5 pm.
Please register here!
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Proto-zone
Contamination/
Hi-Intensity
The Impossibility of Living Without Each Other
Contamination means danger—and change: which systems and structures are currently in the process of dissolution? How do they change, and under which circumstances do they reappear in the current crisis? We bring in resilience as counter-image and counter-strategy. The pressing question of our time is: what makes communities and ecosystems resilient?
Contamination/
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for detailed program please check agenda
Supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Pro Helvetia – Schweizer Kulturstiftung, Abteilung Kultur Basel-Stadt, Saly Frommer Stiftung, Badertscher AG
Participating Artists:
SabrinaRöthlis-berger
Le Sang, Performance
In videos, performances, sets, installations and texts, Sabrina Röthlisberger addresses pain, sickness, medically induced liminal states, death, survival, recovery and the questionable “return to normal”. In the context of CONTAMINATION/
Sabrina Röthlisbergers installation in the Protozone will be activated by the artist in the first night with the live-performance “Le Sang”, that is based on her poetry book with the same title. Sabrina Röthlisberger developed “Le Sang” at the Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, in collaboration with fellow artists Garance Bonard (music) and Tamara Alegre (choreography).
Supported by Pro Helvetia – Schweizer Kulturstiftung
LouDrago
Suspending Time: Meditations for accessing alternate space/
For the work Suspending Time: Meditations for accessing alternate space/
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RadicalSociability
What started out as a vigilante strategy for bringing accountability to powerful people who had previously been immune to any consequences for their actions, is increasingly becoming an unreflective method for bullying within communities. Whether to call it call-out culture, cancel-culture or shaming-culture is hotly debated, but regardless of its name, by now its toxicity is undeniable.
Lou Drago has been investigating identity politic’s role in perpetuating what socio-political observers have called the “fracturing of the Left,” and cancel-culture’s role in deepening divides along identity-based lines. For this initial workshop, Drago will introduce their ideas around enacting intersectional affinity through a process called Radical Sociability, and through a series of exercises, speculate with participants on how to be receptive and humble in order to really enact solidarity.
Together participants will be invited to share experiences and ideas as to why the ‘Left’ have so readily taken up the oppressors’ tools, and how we might combat this to encourage solidarity and empathy instead of doing capital’s divisive work for it.
Limited number of participants, please register here.
With this workshop, Shedhalle takes part in the program Ü40 – Rote Fabrik, *24.10.1980
CriticalCam GirlReadingGroup
In her practice Ehrenstein focusses on the intersections of networked images, tech and migration. Material culture as well as science and technology studies are the basis of looking at representation and platform capitalism through a queer feminist, decolonial lens.
For the “Critical Cam Girl Reading Group” Anna Ehrenstein teamed up with “House of Tupamaras” .
Ehrenstein also worked within the Collective for “Tupamaras Technophallus” , the work cycle shown at “Protozone”.
The workshop has three parts. A start through collective reading of decolonial science, tech and post-humanist studies critique spiced up with femme empowerment poetics,
second; encouraging the participator to develop it’s absolutely new posthuman alter ego and
third (virtually tune) in “House of Tupamaras” to transform oral and written theory into embodied knowledge games and cam girl dances.
Please register for the workshop here, so that we know how many of you show up :)
With this workshop, Shedhalle takes part in the program Ü40 – Rote Fabrik, *24.10.1980
É
feeling connected means being permeable without melting, means listening to the unheard, listening to the subtle shifts and listening to the mental sounds, morbid spaces and dissonant dramas. <3
OmskSocialClub
Lucid Hardware – The Sleep Temple
This hybrid Sleepover Asclepeions Temple uses both the methodology of the ancient greek healing night temples and the peer comfort of a teen sleepover.
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Register here as group of 2 or 4 with all names and email addresses.
Stéph &Tina YemiReden
The self-help community dispensary
The self-help community dispensary is a space to find healing, to practice self-care and care for the community – built by the many and made for the many. It is a pharmacy for togetherness, a place to heal, to sooth, to take care and mutually protect each other.
The remedies will be made collectively on the 14th of November 2020.
The workshop is already fully booked, but the remedies can be collected from the evening of the 14th.
soungou
new to it all, soungou is excited finding his place in the (nocturnal) playground of music and celebration. With the help of cute music he hopes to create spaces, new biotopes for the queer and for the people of colour, for the coloured queers! It all is about celebrating and caring for each other.
FMMF
FM MF is a duo based in Zurich. Their interest spans from early electronics to the hyper produced breaks of today. A freely assembled narration of spoken word tracks, external field recordings, collapsing noises and limping beats.
LaurynYoudenDarkWater
Installation + Video Screening
Dark Water, 2020 performed by Lauryn Youden is an auto-theoretical text that examines the history of mourning, lamentation and death as central to the daily lives of European society during the rise of capitalist patriarchy and the plague; as well as the divination and ritualistic practices used by many to endure this period of time.
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StealingtheFutures
with: Bojana Kunst + Isabelle Vuong / DUST x Shedhalle
In this talk organized by DUST, Bojana Kunst and Isabelle Vuong help us understand how we can steal back the futures that were promised us. You can attend the talk live Zurich at Shedhalle (where Isabelle Vuong is present) or in Amsterdam (where DUST is present). If you cannot make it to Zurich or Amsterdam, you can join online via zoom (meeting ID: 89421981173).
The talk is in English and (lightly) moderated by DUST. The talk will be recorded.
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BabyVal
dj-set/
Around 3 a.m. Born in a bubble out of a bubble – the dj sets of Zurich’s most known unknown Baby Val form a mixture of different worlds ranging from elektro and techno to jungly breaks with a tip of cheesy rnb edits every now and then. Her way of mixing is an approach to break in and out of conventional and monotonous dancefloor rythms and to fall in another dimension of sphere that she’s going to play with – at any time possible to explode.
Proto-zoneContamination/ResilienceLo-Intensity
The Impossibility of Living Without Each Other
Contamination means danger—and change: which systems and structures are currently in the process of dissolution? How do they change, and under which circumstances do they reappear in the current crisis? We bring in resilience as counter-image and counter-strategy. The pressing question of our time is: what makes communities and ecosystems resilient?
Contamination/
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open saturday/
until one hour past sundown
for special program check agenda
Participating artists:
TheArmyofLove
Safe Touch
Self-isolation is an additional intimate discrimination against the elderly, the sick, and singles. But there is intimacy that doesn’t need touch, and there are ways to touch safely. Just as people developed an understanding of “safe sex” in response to the AIDS crisis, we now have to learn and promote “safe touch.”
Safe Touch is a tutorial video, directed by Ingo Niermann for the Army of Love, on how to be safely intimate with strangers during the Corona crisis
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Proto-Club
We all move together
After this time of hibernation, Shedhalle craves the bodily experience of music, of being and moving together. Therefore, Equipped with a strong function-one speaker-system, Proto-Club: We all move together showcases video works by artists who are working at the intersections of social movements with club culture, music and dance.
With/
Nguzunguzu: Just a Touch (4.22 min, shown between all the videos)
Wu Tsang: Into a Space of Love (25.34 min)
Cecilia Bengolea: Lightning Dance (6.36 min)
Bárbara Wagner/
Frédéric Gies: Queens of the Fauns (49.32 min, shown every day as the last video, 50min before Shedhalle closes, as well as Friday additionally around 6pm, Saturday additionally around 5pm and Sunday additionally around 3pm)
Shedhalle x Schauspielhaus: As part of this programme, works by members of the group Moved by the Motion, who work at Schauspielhaus Zürich, are shown at Shedhalle. <3
You don’t have enough yet? Tune in every Wednesday to join the Disco Workouts of Gessnerallee!
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Con-tinuity/Trans-passing
making histories together in more-than-human worlds
curated by Lucie Tuma
This Protozone is an invitation to linger and nest, to dwell and exist. The space is being inhabited by different artistic positions. Different but not separate – in difference and yet not to be separated from each other. Over years and in continuity, the practices and processes of the invited artists have been in close contact with more-than-human forms of existence. Spectres, rocks, water, algorithms, slime mold, swarms, plants, Artificial Intelligence, quantum leaps and AlterIdentities. These contacts generate a state of transpassing. With it come shifts, variations, mutations.
As soon as we enter, the hereby mutated temporalities will seize us. We are at the end of «our time».
every Saturday 14-20 and Sunday 14-18
dates tba in mid-April
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