Artist Conversation with Linda Semadeni, Tasnim Baghdadi & Kathrin Bentele

Venue: Caring Space

“My work resembles a dance that explores the relationship between the world, the body and the sense of self. With the help of documentary, conceptual and performative approaches and forms, I deal poetically with the assertion of an existence.” - Linda Semadeni

On the occasion of her current intervention Screen Recordings (2024-25) at Löwenbräukunst, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst invites you to an artist talk with the artist Linda Semadeni.

In her work, Semadeni considers the smartphone as a pre-existing art object (readymade) and interprets its language, words, and icons as social and cultural artifacts that shape our perception and actions. She describes this place where we spend our daily lives as an ambivalent mixture of apparent openness and structural narrowness—shaped by repetition and the commercialization of the individual. As in her work «Sliding through the Corridors» at the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, 2022, where she appropriated the phrase: «I'm not a nice girl» in its individual words, writing it in constant repetition and distortion on the floor of the institution to question a structure that seems familiar and everyday to us.

Central questions of her practice are: How is a self composed? Where am I? And how can I, as an artist, connect with the world around me? Another key aspect of her work is fragility and precariousness—which she sees as a strength. She deals with movements that expand and contract and explore inner and outer bodily feelings. Her artistic language poetically appropriates the structures of the present while at the same time questioning and reasserting them.

In conversation with Tasnim Baghdadi, curator of the exhibition and co-director of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and curator and Director of Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsselforf Kathrin Bentele, Linda Semadeni will explore these themes in greater depth and place them in the context of her current artistic practice.

The event takes place as part of Zurich Art Weekend 2025.

Linda Semadeni (*1985, Bern, Switzerland) lives and works in Zurich. She completed a BFA at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2015 and studied Performative Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2014/15. Using media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, video and performance, she questions what moves us. In 2023 she received the Manor Art Prize of the Canton of Graubünden. Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (2022), the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève (2022) and the Kunsthalle Zürich (2020). In spring 2025, she will be part of a group exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein.

Kathrin Bentele has been Director of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf since 2021 and will take over as the new Artistic Director of Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg on 1 October 2025. She previously worked at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Artists Space in New York, Kunsthaus Glarus and the art book publisher JRP|Ringier in Zurich, among others. She has lectured and taught at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, the University of Cologne, the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the Münster Art Academy and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Bentele studied art history and cultural analysis at the University of Zurich.

Tasnim Baghdadi is Co-Director of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst since 2023. She is responsible for its programmes, curates exhibitions and develops institutional strategies with a focus on public engagement, transdisciplinary collaboration and socially engaged art. From 2021 to 2023, she was Head of Education and Programmes at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and previously worked at the Fondation Beyeler and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 at the interface of education, curation and community building. In addition to her curatorial work, she is active as a speaker and author and contributes to decolonial discourses in the German-speaking museum sector. Baghdadi studied art history, curating and product design.

Language: English