Concerns at Shedhalle Zürich Through the Decades – A Historiographic Speculation

This project explores the emergence, preservation, and transmission of knowledge and experience within curatorial and artistic practice. It examines forms of institutional memory as a space of possibility for transhistorical narratives concerning concerns, working methods, and production conditions related to siituated processes of art and knowledge production.

Shedhalle Zürich, an independent art space with a forty-year history, serves as a case study of a self-organized archival practice. These archives document the aesthetic strategies, production tools, and forms of curatorial practice that have emerged in specific historical contexts. The concept of knowledge applied here includes both discursive and embodied knowledge, with a particular focus on friendship, love, and care as forms of affective-immaterial labor. This emphasis is crucial, as these areas of experience face challenges in terms of visibility and preservation. By understanding knowledge as a situated and socially generated process shaped by diverse practices, this study critically examines essentialist concepts of knowledge and their potential expansion through demands for epistemic justice. Following discussions on the concept of archives in the second half of the 20th century and in the context of an economy of attention, questions concerning artistic-curatorial production, (re)distribution, and canonization of knowledges are asked anew.

Archival practices have the potential to provide sustainable orientation for future generations. Against the backdrop of increasingly anti-democratic politics and the consequences of decades of austerity policies in Europe, questions of institutional continuity and the possibilities of resilient practices emerge as a means of transmitting and reactivating (historical) knowledges. What can we learn from the past regarding the preservation of diverse publics and forms of knowledge?

To explore these questions, different moments in the history of Shedhalle Zürich since 1985 are examined. One area of investigation focuses on how curatorial practices have the capacity to transform institutions on an (infra)structural level. A second aspect examines the organization and reflection of working methods and production conditions that have been developed and cultivated in specific historical periods. Here, the often invisible forms of care and aspects of affective labor serve as guiding perspectives for approaching curatorial practice. A third focus considers how publics are generated. What media and formats are used, appropriated, or newly developed? What can be inferred from these curatorial decisions about the relationship between audiences and art spaces?

For the historiographic-speculative analysis of both contemporary and historical examples from Shedhalle’s exhibition practice, archival materials are consulted. These include publications by curatorial teams, video and image collections, and press reports. The production level is further examined through annual reports, budgets, and documents related to the organization’s board activities. These existing sources are expanded through oral history formats, such as interviews with key actors and conversations with witnesses from different periods.

One chapter of this research is dedicated to the experimental exhibition practice PROTOZONES 2020–2025. The curatorial program and concept of the ‘Protozone,’ developed within this framework, focuses on process-based art. The self-reflection of my own curatorial approach engages with discussions on ecologies of attention and proposes an exhibition practice in which different modes of attention are equally fostered. A key question here is to what extent a process-oriented practice of exhibition-making has the potential to transform the institutions that host it.

At the core of this research lies the question of epistemic justice. This concern is linked to the broader question of how ethical-political values can be transferred into institutional transformation and implemented on an (infra)structural level. In this context, the concept of infrastructure plays a key role, as it has been discussed over the past decade in transdisciplinary exchanges between anthropology, human geography, and cultural studies. Drawing on anthropologist Brian Larkin, infrastructures are understood as material or immaterial objects that organize, relate, and mediate between other objects. Infrastructure is simultaneously an object and the enabling or limiting condition for the emergence and movement of other objects.

From this perspective, and through a transhistorical approach, the analysis connects related concerns across different periods. It identifies moments in curatorial and artistic practices that operate on an infrastructural level—practices that make visible, repurpose, or shift the social, economic, and epistemological conditions of their production.