Barengasse Museum, Zurich, Switzerland 

8 August  to  6 December , 2014

 

 

Romancing the Context treats the exhibition as a thinking instrument, a fan devoted to the worlds that art makes possible. We ask a direct question: what do we mean by context, and how might we show it. We begin a narrative that refuses closure. From the slow accretion of cultural stalactites and stalagmites to the present tense of interpretation, we track how meanings harden, dissolve, and reform in relation to time, place, and audience.

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We assemble discerning works by Habib Asal (1974), Tim Wandelt (1982), and Karina Kurzmeyer (1987). Each artist advances a different tactic for approaching and defining ideas, not to fix them in place but to test how they travel. Rather than over-explain what feels self-evident, we redistribute the task of definition. Context belongs to all who make and all who look, so the exhibition shares authorship with its viewers and invites them to complete the circuit of meaning.

The presentation unfolds in three related constellations:

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A. The Melancholic Context
We consider context as sediment. Works gather traces, citations, and residual forms. Memory acts as a slow geology, and the exhibition reads these deposits with care. Melancholy here is not defeat but attention, a way to hold what persists and what has slipped from view.

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B. The Futuristic Context
We treat context as a vector that leans forward. Proposals, models, and speculative images test how ideas might operate in near futures. The gallery becomes a studio for rehearsal, where form meets anticipation and method meets invention.

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C. The Traumatised Context
We face the fractures that mark social and personal histories. Works acknowledge rupture and ask how language, image, and structure adapt in the aftermath. Context appears as a field of contested meanings in which repair is both necessary and provisional.

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Across these sections the exhibition works with a simple principle in active voice. To define context, we share it. We stage situations in which interpretation moves between makers, works, and publics. Romancing the Context begins at the threshold of understanding and refuses to end there. It invites close looking, clear thinking, and the pleasure of being implicated in the meanings we collectively produce and share to the world.