Maria Eichhorn, BUILDING AS UNOWNED PROPERTY [GEBÄUDE ALS NICHTEIGENTUM] (2017– ) WITH RAPHAEL GYGAX AND NADIA SCHNEIDER WILLEN

Venue: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1. Floor

Maria Eichhorn's work Kτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη / Building as Unowned Property (2017-) was created on the occasion of documenta 14 in Athens. It consists of acquiring a property in Athens in order to transfer it to the legal status of non-ownership and thus create a free space where the effects of global capitalism on the urban fabric can be rethought from an artistic, feminist-Marxist perspective.

The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst acquired the work for its collection in 2018 and showed it in the 2018-2019 exhibition Maria Eichhorn: Zwölf Arbeiten / Twelve Works (1988-2018). The publication Kτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη / Building as Unowned Property of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition Accumulation - on accumulation, growth and excess, in which Eichhorn's work will be presented until 25 May 2025. It documents the process of acquiring the property and transferring it to the status of non-ownership, which has been ongoing since 2017, and provides a variety of work documents: from the artist's project proposal, legal texts, historical maps and visual material to the notarised purchase contract and the land register entry, which serves as the basis for further work processes.

With a foreword by Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder as well as essays by Anne Rorimer, André Rottmann, Adam Szymczyk and Constantina Theodorou.

As part of the exhibition, the museum invites visitors to a focus tour with the curator Raphael Gygax, who accompanied the creation of the work. He will explain the background to the artwork in a discussion with the collection curator and co-curator of the current exhibition, Nadia Schneider Willen.

Schedule:

6:30 – 7:00 PM: Focus tour with Raphael Gygax and Nadia Schneider Willen, 1st Floor

7:00 – 8:00 PM: Book presentation Maria Eichhorn, Kτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη (Building as Unowned Property, 2024) and reception, Caring Space

• No registration required
• Free event
• In German

Maria Eichhorn (*1962) took part in documenta 11 (2002) and documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). In 2022 she designed the German Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. In 2021 she received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts. Her current monographs include Kτίριο ως περιουσία άνευ ιδιοκτήτη / Building as Unowned Property (2024), Reuchlinstraße 4 b, 70178 Stuttgart (2024) and Relocating a Structure (2022).

Dr. Raphael Gygax (*1980) is an art historian, curator and author and lives in Locarno, Switzerland. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the use of instrumentalised bodies in contemporary art (Extra Bodies - The Use of the ‘Other Body’ in Contemporary Art). From 2003 to 2019 he was curator at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich. From 2019 to 2023 he was head of the Bachelor of Fine Arts programme at the Zurich University of the Arts. Since autumn 2023, he has been working as an independent curator and has organised exhibitions in Zurich, London, Paris, Luxembourg, Locarno and New York. He curated the exhibition programme at the Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno in 2023 and became curator for digital art at ART on THE MART in Chicago, the world's largest permanent digital art projection, in 2024-25. In 2024, he was also appointed Curator-at-Large at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Nadia Schneider Willen is a part of the collective leadership of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and is responsible for the collection. From 2015 to 2023, she worked as a collection curator at the same institution. She previously worked as a curator for modern and contemporary art at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva and as director of the Kunsthaus Glarus, among other positions, and has curated numerous exhibitions with international and Swiss artists. She was a member of the Federal Art Commission for many years, later becoming its president. She studied French literature and linguistics and art history at the University of Zurich.