Collection Bites – tidbits from the collection

We are pleased to present our new video format «Collection Bites»!

In Collection Bites, personalities from pop culture, music, politics, sports and the social sphere meet works from the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Collection Bites provides space for unconventional interpretations and personal interactions with art. Little tidbits emerge from the encounter, providing a unique insight into the museum's diverse collection in just a few minutes.

• Episode 1: Anna Rosenwasser meets Guerilla Girls
• Episode 2: Knackeboul meets Sylvie Fleury

More episodes are already in the works. We'll keep you posted and until then, have fun diving into our collection!

LGBTQ-activist, political influencer and moderator Anna Rosenwasser meets the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous feminist artists’ collective that has dedicated itself to the fight against sexism and racism in the art world. Similar to the Guerilla Girls, Anna's activism works with thought-provoking political messages and memes, which she cleverly uses in the digital space in favour of empowerment.

The collective formed in 1985 in response to the exhibition International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at New York’s MoMA, where less than 10% of the featured artists were women and the overwhelming majority were white. Incensed by such unequal representation, the collective has employed guerrilla tactics with the stated aim of drawing attention to mechanisms of patriarchal and racist exclusion in art and culture. Wearing gorilla masks and disguising their identities by adopting the names of dead women artists like Frida Kahlo or Käthe Kollwitz, the group’s members leverage the power of humor, provocation, and protest. For example, they have plastered the walls of public spaces with eye-catching posters to articulate their demands, combining slogans that pinpoint grievances with illustrations from art history and statistical data they typically compile themselves in works of trenchant irony. For the first decades of their existence, the Guerrilla Girls typically operated outside the art system, but over time they have become an institution in their own right. What has not changed is their commitment to holding a mirror up to institutions, harnessing the «art of bad behavior» to initiate changes.

These works by the Guerilla Girls are part of the collection, amongst 1400 others.

Rapper, beatboxer, entertainer and activist Knackeboul meets Sylvie Fleury's First Spaceship on Venus (1995).

A critical spirit, Knackeboul's multifaceted work questions the world as it presents itself around him, ponders utopias and consistently asks for the truth. In doing so, he does not shy away from pointing out irritations and taking a look at power relations. In his confrontation with Sylvie Fleury's work, he literally turns the rocket and patriarchal relations upside down.

In her installations, sculptures and mixed media works, the Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury takes an in-depth look at symbols of consumer and pop culture that shape our needs and behaviours. By presenting masculinely connoted qualities such as bravado, a spirit of conquest, technical savvy or dominance as qualities to be read as feminine, Fleury plays relentlessly and subversively with the mechanisms of materialistic desire and the construction of values. With the «spaceship» she also challenges the macho artist gesture and reinterprets the highly polished object of the rocket, associated with masculinity, as a female domain. Songs by American female pop bands of the 1960s sound from the sculpture's loudspeakers. The title First Spaceship on Venus also quotes the German-Polish science fiction film production of the same name from 1960. At the time of the Cold War, this film speculated about space exploration and nuclear disaster scenarios.

This work by Sylvie Fleury is part of the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, amongst 1400 others.

Knackeboul's song, inspired by Fleury's work and created as part of the project, is called «Ragete» and can be listened to here.