Nestled in the heart of Geneva’s Old Town, the Museum of Art and History ranks among Switzerland’s largest museums. Boasting a collection of around 650,000 objects spanning applied arts, fine arts, and archaeology across five floors, the museum embraces a dynamic and innovative approach to showcase its treasures through unexpected exhibitions. Annually, it hosts approximately ten temporary exhibitions, frequently inviting contemporary artists to contribute. The museum organizes a variety of surprising events, including yoga classes in the galleries and after-work parties.
Katharina Hohmann presents the final chapter of a three-part public-art project focusing on the museum’s resident cats. The work combines poster series, a cat flap intervention in a museum door, and a book that compiles a photographic testimony of the project alongside commissioned texts. Reproduced collages appear in facsimile as a detachable, notebook-like object, allowing them to be reused as posters. The project probes relationships between animals, collections and public space through collage, photography and text.
Exposition Observatoires is presented as a guided public tour led by an art historian, examining an exhibition that gathers works by contemporary artists exploring observation, perception and the politics of looking.
The presentation focuses on photographic, sculptural and installation-based projects, highlighting material processes and archival strategies. The tour situates the works within historical and personal contexts and invites reflection on how images and objects mediate attention and shape collective ways of seeing.
In French.
Curatorial project exploring representations of nudity and the gendered gaze, bringing together works from a public collection in dialogue with Sylvia Sleigh’s practice.
The programme questions the ‘male gaze’ through portraiture and figurative painting, examining how heroic and erotic framings shape bodies and spectatorship. It proposes a feminist rereading of art-historical canons, revealing how institutional collections and feminist perspectives reframe familiar images and power relations.
In French.
Facilitated by Fabienne Regad, a bereavement support companion who accompanies bereaved people, together with a cultural mediator. Regad draws on practical experience in group listening and peer support.
This conversation explores personal experiences of loss, examining emotions, needs and coping practices in a respectful, secular and non-therapeutic setting. Participants are invited to share and listen, investigating communal modes of support, empathy and meaning-making around bereavement.
In French.
Swiss-based artist John M Armleder assembles a playful yet probing exhibition that reconfigures everyday objects and artistic tropes. Works range from self-portraits and floral bouquets to a monumental disco ball installation and taxidermied animals, combining found and crafted elements.
The presentation stages a dialogue between Armleder’s pieces and the institution’s collection, interrogating display conventions, spectacle and the border between ornament and artwork. Through juxtaposition and scale, the show asks how context reshapes meaning and perception.
With a cultural mediator and a French Sign Language interpreter
Historian Gérard Duc presents research grounded in a specially released object from the museum collection, placing watchmakers’ training within the 19th-century shift towards mechanization.
This talk examines major mutations in Geneva’s watchmaking industry, exploring how schools and craftsmen adapted techniques, how pedagogical practices preserved artisanal savoir-faire, and what these transformations reveal about technology, labor and cultural continuity and their legacy for contemporary craft and heritage studies.
In French.
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