ZHdK Curatorial Studies

16/10/2026

MICHAEL TAUSSIG: Postcards for Mia. The Role of Images in Ethnographic Notebooks and in Our Ways of Thinking  

For more than half a century Michael Taussig has drawn and painted in his ethnographic fieldwork notebooks. Cabaret Voltaire shows the postcards addressed to Mia together with drawings and watercolours from the notebooks and from his books, among them Co**se Magic (2025). The image here is not an illustration of a thought but a thought conducted by other means. Homesickness runs through the work, a reminder that the ethnographer is, first of all, someone far from home.  

The exhibition is co-organized by the Chair of Art in Space and Time, ETH Zurich , the MA Cultural Critique, Curatorial Studies, and Cabaret Voltaire.  

👀 Exhibition Michael Taussig
🥂Opening: October 27, 6pm, with a conversation with Michael Taussig, Rosa Barba, Anselm Franke, and Corinne Diserens at 7pm 
📅 Exhibition: October 28-November 22 
💎Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich

Michael Taussig is an ex medical doctor and anthropologist working mainly in Colombia and Theoryland, who has made sketches and watercolours in his ethnographic fieldwork notebooks for many a decade. Born in Sydney in 1940, he studied medicine there, worked in psychiatric hospitals in and near London, and took his PhD at the LSE. His research in Colombia has concerned sugar plantations displacing peasant tree farms in the southern Cauca Valley, Indigenous shamanism in the Upper Amazon, and ex-slave gold miners on the Pacific coast. He taught at the University of the Andes, Bogotá, the University of Michigan, Performance Studies at NYU, and was Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, 1993-2020. His best known books are Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing; Mimesis and Alterity; I Swear I Saw This; and Postcards for Mia. 

Cabaret Voltaire

11/10/2026

05/10/2026

🧜[our guests in autumn]🧜

We are excited to announce that Pauline Curnier Jardin will visit us this Thursday, October 8, in the MA Cultural Critique - Curatorial Studies program as a guest in the course Moving Matters.

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is a Berlin-Rome based artist working across experimental cinema, installation, performance, film, and drawing. Her outstanding cinematic installations create unorthodox universes and tell stories, thus proposing alternative narratives.

Pauline Curnier Jardin

➔ About the course:
How to think with, select, narrate and curate moving matters?
The module Moving Matters (Workshop Curating), focusses on different fields and aspects of curatorial practice. This year, we will take a look at the curation with and of movement. We will meet international and local artist and curators dealing with time-based media, with choreography and with art in the context of a changing environment. Together with them, we ask for open dramaturgies, diverse time cycles, entangled organic matters, embodied modes of experiences and movements in spectatorship. We will contextualize our observations within a curatorial field and ask how the practice and discipline of curating itself can be understood as being in motion. The aim of the course is to develop a sensibility and critical understanding towards different artistic practices, current approaches, debates and challenges in the field of curating, and their evolvement in a moving field.

Picture by Pirje Mykkänen / Kansallisgalleria

09/06/2026

Zurich Art Weekend Research Tour:
ORIGINALGRAPHIK: A REFLECTION TO BE CONTINUED
By Juliette Cornaz

Focusing on the themes of art publishing and multiples, the walk will centre on Edition VFO (Verein für Originalgraphik), located in the Löwenbräu Areal. The tour will guide participants through the complexities of issues surrounding seriality and uniqueness, accessibility and democratisation of art. What makes an original? What processes of creation and dissemination do artists, publishers, printers, collectors and institutions engage in through print art?
The historical position of Edition VFO within Zurich’s art scene, as well as the unique nature of its archives, will provide a central point for a reflection on contemporary print art. This journey will lead participants to question the challenges of today’s art production and the status of artworks.

Juliette Cornaz (*2000) works and lives between Zurich and Lausanne. She combines her practice as an interior architect with a Master in Cultural Critique, Curatorial Studies at ZHdK, Zurich University of Arts. Focusing on her interest in scenography, she works with various materials and media, combining practical and theoretical approaches. Guided by curiosity and attention to details, her work addresses questions related to art production and status of objects and places.

📅 Sat, June 13, 11:30 – 12:30 | EN
📅 Sun, June 14, 14:00 – 15:00 | EN
💎 Meeting point: Hardstrasse 316, 8005 Zurich
❗Accessible with wheelchair

RSVP -> link in bio

 .cornaz 



08/06/2026

Zurich Art Weekend Research Tour:
SUMATRA(?)STRASSE: A LANDSCAPE TO DECONSTRUCT
By Anja Roosens

What stories do everyday environments reveal or conceal? This tour is a participatory invitation to look closer. A street name in Kreis 6 becomes an entry point into colonial entanglements embedded in the city and invites you to question the familiar. By tracing photography as an archival medium, we will explore ways in which collective memory is formed, and the role ‘naming’ plays in the process. The route continues by looking at a group of insects at the ETH Entomological Collection, where we connect the discussion to the history of the institution. At the upper end of the street, the tour concludes at Galerie Oskar Weiss, connecting to Laura Langer’s contemporary works reflecting on space and the everyday. By moving between past and present, observing and drawing connections, the urban landscape can be seen as more than just a backdrop as we ask what is needed for its (re-)construction. As a vessel of memory, desire, and imagination, it holds traces of what was, what remains, and what has been erased.

Anja Roosens (*2001) is a mediator and emerging curator, with an interest in photography and early modern history, currently pursuing a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts. Sourcing from her background in Art History at the University of Bern and her time at the Precollege in Art and Design at HSLU DFK, she explores questions of archiving, museum history, and critical mediation, with particular attention to the mundane and its potential to evoke connections to stories yet to be told.

📅 Fri, June 12, 17:30 – 19:30 | EN
📅 Sat, June 13, 15:00 – 16:30 | EN
💎 Tram Station Haldenegg, 8006 Zurich / Weinbergstrasse 41, 8006 Zürich
❗We will mostly be moving outside. A rather steep road towards the end of the tour. Stairs at the entrance to Galerie Oskar Weiss.

RSVP -> link in bio

 



27/05/2026

Zurich Art Weekend Research Tour:
OTHERED WORLDS AND THE WESTERN GAZE
By Parita Upadhyaya

Beginning at We are AIA’s exhibition Botanical Memories at Zurich’s Botanical Garden, continuing through the Old Town, and ending at the ETH Bildarchiv, this walk explores divisions between humans and non-humans, colonial trade histories, and marginalised forms of knowledge. It examines how scientific ideas of progress have shaped perceptions and representations of plants, humans, and the “other.”

Parita Upadhyaya is an architect, researcher, and curator whose work engages with archival research and colonial historiography. Working at the intersection of architecture and curatorial practice, her experience spans architectural exhibitions, interpretive planning, and teaching. Her research focuses on processes of meaning-making in the production of culture, inquiring how histories are constructed, mediated, and represented.

Fri, June 12, 16:00 – 17:30 | EN
Sun, June 14, 15:00 – 17:00 | EN

RSVP via the Zurich Art Weekend website-> link in bio

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, an innovative research-driven tour format has been developed in collaboration with the MA Cultural Critique, Curatorial Studies (head: Prof. Dr. Anselm Franke) from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and with the support of Hannah Eßler. These tours will lead audiences to unique and behind-the-scenes locations across Zurich, guided by emerging curators Anja Roosens, Sonia Mesarova, Parita Upadhyaya, Juliette Cornaz, and Maria Sorensen.
This initiative builds on a long-standing collaboration between Zurich Art Weekend and ZHdK’s MA Cultural Critique, Curatorial Studies (former MA Art Education, Curatorial Studies) which began in 2018 and continues to foster art mediation practices and public education through guided tours.






19/05/2026

Zurich Art Weekend Research Tour
ROUTES OF ROOTS:
FOLK KNOWLEDGE BREAKING THROUGH PAVEMENT CRACKS
By Sonia Mesarova

Embedded within the concrete infrastructure of the city, this tour will highlight places where art, folk knowledge and nature collide in Zurich’s urban context. Stumbling upon plants hidden between pavement cracks and encountering art in unsuspecting places, how can folk knowledge guide and inspire us in the city in our every day?

Sonia Mesarova is a curator and illustrator based in Zurich, currently enrolled in the MA Cultural Critique, Curatorial Studies programme at ZHdK. In her curatorial practice she works across disciplines, having been a member of Tate Collective Producers at Tate St Ives and engages in collaborative and community projects, organising music events in Somerset, UK. Since completing her undergraduate studies in Illustration at Falmouth University, she has an interest in mediation and focuses on printmaking in her artistic practice.

Sat, June 13, 11:00 – 13:00 | EN
Sun, June 14, 11:00 – 13:00 | EN

RSVP via the Zurich Art Weekend website-> link in bio

17/04/2026

Lenses of (Re)presentation
24./25.04.2026
Toni-Areal, Kunstraum 5.K12

How many ways are there to tell a story? We take art off the museum’s walls and craft our own narratives—11 distinct voices engage with the artwork of their choice as video and audio pieces. During the Minor Curatorial Practice, we had a chance to research a piece of artwork, approach it from different angles and perspectives and find new meanings within it. The result is pretty spectacular and we look forward to sharing it with you.
 
Friday, 24 April 2026
Doors open: 6.00 p.m.
Screening starts:  6.30 p.m.
The non-recurring screening will take place over the evening at Kunstraum 5.K12, followed by an after-party.
 
Saturday, 25 April 2026
Long Table: 4.00  p.m.
When is art most alive, (do institutions kill art)? Where can art happen? You are invited to The Long Table for a community discussion — a dinner party where conversation is the main course. With refreshments served at Kunstraum K.512.

Countdown for the website:
Lenses.zhdk.ch

Presenting works by 
Sofija Digam, MA Kulturpublizistik
Harry Beardmore, MA Fine Arts .beardmore
Sophie Gäumann, MA Curatorial Studies
Linda Hauser, MA Fine Arts
Chloe Kelly, MA Curatorial studies
Maria Sorensen, MA Curatorial Studies
Keshia Palm, MA Theater
Luna Olivain, MA Curatorial Studies
Martyna Olejnik, MA Curatorial studies 
Lara Peters, MA Fine Arts Art:ificial Studies
Thalia Tulkens, MA Transdisciplinary in the Arts

Mentored by Anselm Franke, Judith Welter, Jasmina Metwaly , Nadja Schmid , Antonio Scarponi

14/04/2026

Masculinity, Race and Empire
A lecture by Saree Makdisi

We are excited to invite you to our upcoming open lecture by Saree Makdisi. The lecture will address the relationship between discourses of masculinity, race and modernity as they emerged in the Romantic period and were gradually consolidated through the nineteenth century. Discourses of progress, improvement, discipline, productivity and so on were all gendered in this period, with masculinity located as the privileged aspirational pole (for women as well as men) and femininity and effeminacy seen as problems to overcome or threats to the emerging order. The paper will explore the overlaps and continuities between domestic discourses and the patterns and practices of overseas empire as well as Orientalism—all of which, with their attendant racial logics, can be seen to be at work within the national space as much as outside it.
The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anselm Franke.

Saree Makdisi is professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), specializing in eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature.

Masculinity, Race and Empire.
A lecture by Saree Makdisi
23.04.2026, 18:00 – 20:00
Toni-Areal, Viaduktraum 2.A05, Ebene 2, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich

No registration required.

-> Event link in Bio

Image: Portrait of Colin Mackenzie with three of his Indian assistants, painted by Thomas Hickey in 1816