Museum Tinguely
Until March 9, 2025

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, lengths of string make shapes. String figures can do many things—they tell stories, they pass the time, they make the unsayable showable, they connect people. As one of humanity’s oldest cultural practices, they have inspired artists, performers, ethnologists, and theorists. String figures have been studied as an aesthetic practice, collected as artifacts, and considered as a non-Western way of thinking.

In recent years, string figures have gained prominence in cultural theory. Donna Haraway promotes string figures as a method of interdisciplinary and interspecies thinking and collaboration. Unlike the technicist metaphor of the network, Haraway’s string figures provide a playful, process-oriented, embodied (and non-Western) way of thinking, emphasizing responsibility.

This exhibition brings together these diverse strands of art, anthropology, and theory, fostering connections among people from different regions of the world, and exploring ways of playing together on the ruins of our history.
There will be a public opening of the exhibit on November 19 at 18:30; admission to the opening is free.

https://www.tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2024/fadenspiele.html

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