ZURICH.- The US artist, filmmaker and theatre director Wu Tsang returns to Heimplatz following her acclaimed productions at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. From 11 July 2025, as part of the ‘ReCollect!’ series, she teams up with author, curator and dramaturge Enrique Fuenteblanca to present an intervention comprising works from the Kunsthaus Collection and a new sound installation.

Wu Tsang (b. 1982 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a visual artist, filmmaker and theatre director whose works weave together documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical excursions into imaginary realms. Wu Tsang is known for her long standing cooperations, particularly with the interdisciplinary collective Moved by the Motion, whose members include Tosh Basco, Asma Maroof and Josh Johnson. In Zurich, she thrilled audiences with her poetic works as director in residence at the Schauspielhaus from 2019/20 to 2023/24.

Now, Wu Tsang returns to Heimplatz together with the author, curator and dramaturge Enrique Fuenteblanca: as part of the ‘ReCollect!’ series, they have conceived an intervention entitled ‘La montaña invertida’ (The Inverted Mountain), featuring works from the Kunsthaus Collection and a sound installation by the artist – a project that is both multi-layered and symbolically charged, transforming the museum’s domed hall into a space for listening, feeling and rethinking. Spring 2026 also sees the opening of the graphic art space presenting further works from the collection and marking the conceptual conclusion of the project.

LA MONTAÑA INVERTIDA: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE COLLECTION AND THE WORLD

The starting point for this curatorial project is the motif of the mountain: an ambivalent topographical and cultural symbol. The mountain represents grandeur, withdrawal and resistance, but also fiction, projection and myth. The title ‘La montaña invertida’ plays with the idea of inversion: what happens if we see things not just differently, but the other way round? When we ‘hear with our ears’, as Tsang and Fuenteblanca put it, and view from the perspective of the marginalized, from the depths rather than the summit?

The presentation is preceded by a number of thematic iterations: the first part of the project was commissioned for the Klanghaus Toggenburg in early 2025 by Cloud Castle, a platform initiated by the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. There, artists such as the singer Rocío Márquez, mezzo-soprano Katia Ledoux, guitarist Raúl Cantizan, saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve and the Moved by the Motion collective came together to develop an atmospheric audio piece. Extending over several days, this artistic retreat was an opportunity for shared reflection on mountains as places of cultural significance – in Spain as well as Switzerland – and forms the centrepiece of the presentation now on show at the Kunsthaus. In the domed room, this reflection evolves into a space-filling, stage-like construction, where visitors can immerse themselves in a multi-layered audio universe that plays with voices, sounds and rhythms, comprising everything from flamenco to contemporary compositions. This sensory experience is complemented by a selection of works from the collection by artists from Marianne von Werefkin and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to Francis Bacon and Nedko Solakov. At its heart is Johann Adam Meisenbach’s iconic photograph of dancers including Suzanne Perrottet and Rudolf von Laban at the foot of Monte Verità in Ascona on Lake Maggiore.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

Perrottet, a pioneer of modern dance teaching, and Laban, the inventor of Labanotation, spent time living and researching on Monte Verità – the reformist colony of artists that explored alternative lifestyles blending mysticism, physical freedom and the avant-garde at the start of the 20th century. In conjunction with the current sound installation, the project builds a bridge between past and present, and between the movements of the body and thought.

The ‘Carmen’ myth – a central system of reference in Tsang and Fuenteblanca’s ongoing research – acts as an additional resonance field. In Bizet’s opera, Carmen takes refuge in the mountains of Andalusia, where a drama of freedom, desire and death plays out. These narratives are reflected in the concept for the intervention: mountains as a place of flight, hiding place and projection surface. In the inverted perspective, the museum itself becomes the stage for an alternative way of seeing and hearing, and an entreaty to engage with the traces of histories that are often merely peripheral to the canon. In this way, ‘La montaña invertida’ becomes a multi layered gesture: a poetic deconstruction of the museum space, a political recontextualization of the collection, and a sensory and acoustic invitation to pause, listen and see things from a different angle. The project was overseen curatorially by Raphael Gygax.