Museum Tinguely
Until March 7, 2027

In the exhibition “Spaces Between,” Zilla Leutenegger presents 10 of her multimedia installations and a number of monotypes, offering glances of mysteriously inhabited architecture and faint outlines of a life. It is as if someone had moved into the building, leaving occasional traces and shadows of their existence. As well as telling short, poetic stories, these moments invite visitors to rediscover the museum and to see it with different eyes.

Leutenegger (*1968 in Zürich) is among the defining figures in Swiss contemporary art. In a beguiling symbiosis of analogue and digital media, her work centers on her unmistakable multimedia installations and the “video drawings” in which she layers mural drawings and video projections. In this way, a static space is suddenly brought to life by the projected shadow of a moving figure. These ingenious spatial situations set the stage for the profound storytelling that plays a key role in her work. She often appears as her alter ego Zilla, a figure who—either filmed, drawn, or digitally constructed—quietly performs everyday actions: reading, waiting, or looking out of the window. Through these intimate moments, the artist weaves a subtle narrative to which viewers respond with memories of their own. Leutenegger’s narratives are rarely linear. Instead, she captures atmospheric states and fleeting emotions. The spaces built out of light, projections, and sketches appear as walk-in dream sequences where the borders between fiction and reality, and between two- and three-dimensionality, become completely blurred. Her oeuvre is an ongoing narrative on the poetry of everyday life. By inviting viewers into her immersive worlds, she makes them into silent partners in her haunting stories.

In this exhibition, her poetic works enter into a compelling dialogue with the museum’s collection. In this exchange, Leutenegger’s subtle, expansive projections encounter Tinguely’s mechanical dynamism. A completely new narrative about movement, light, and space emerges, offering a fascinating reinterpretation of the poetry of everyday life.

https://www.tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2026/zilla-leutenegger.html

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