Artists

Dina Danish, Guillaume Pilet, Sophie Jung, Shana Lutker, Latefa Wiersch, Gregory Tara Hari, Martina-Sofie Wildberger

Press release

 ‘Ahoy ahoi Des Admirals’ is a group exhibition dedicated to performance art with a three-day program of performances during Zurich Art Weekend from 07 – 09 June, 2024. Distinguished from other forms of art by the five elements: time, space, body and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public, this exhibition explores questions of curating, staging and collecting performance art.
 

The title derives from the simultaneous poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison a louer’ by Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck, performed at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on 31 March, 1916, just 500 meters from Barbara Seiler’s gallery location. It was stimulated by the desire to apply the same simultaneous principles in poetry that the Surrealist painters – Picasso, Braque, Picabia, Duchamp-Villon and Delay – experimented with in the transmutation of objects and colors in the first Cubist paintings.
 

 ‘Ahoy ahoi Des Admirals’ examines various forms of performance art in relation to time, space, the body and presence of the artist, and the relation between the artist and the audience: performances on view over the course of three days may last a few minutes or up to an hour, they are happening in the gallery space, outside, or solely in the viewers imagination, they are performed by the artist, by actors, dancers, puppets, and even the audience, they use word and language, a narrative text, or are expressed through the body of dancers, and topics range from gender identity, post-colonialism, culture, feelings of belonging and alienation, surrealism and queer history. What combines them all is their ephemeral characteristic, which makes it at the same time intense and elusive.