10 bucks and a Mars bar. 10 10-euro notes. 10 chocolate-flavored bars. One exhibition at Rosabrux. 28 February 2014. 10 balles et un Mars (10 Bucks and a Mars Bar) is a project initiated by 3-8, whose mission is to bring together young artists freshly minted from a range of schools all of whom have a medium that is specific to their individual practice, be it drawing, performance, graphic novel…

The feeling of deception appears like a form of nostalgia for reality. Literature is full of examples, from the genre known as uchronia to the science fiction that predicts the future. Maxime Bondu (Tournan-en-Brie/F, *1985) examines the forms and themes of our relationship to history and our projection into the future, both of these as mediators of the contemporary age, more than the opposite…

For Videobox, Rosa Brux chose to invite the artist Laurent Güdel to present his film Action directe, discours indirect, first screened in 2019 at the LUFF (Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival). This movie, where we hear people talking but never see them, is based on recorded interviews with veteran trade unionists active in Geneva during the 1920s and ‘30s. Güdel dove deep and came up with…

The group show Almagestes brings together artists, designers, theoreticians, and art critics who were invited to exhibit a list of works from their personal library. While avoiding the possible pitfall of anthologies made up of favorite books, each of the lists explores various forms of declaration and utterance, running from the obvious gesture to the monomaniacal collection, not to mention…

For Rob van Leijsen’s first show in Belgium, Rosa Brux is pleased to present an impossible exhibition catalogue featuring five collections of artworks that were stolen or vandalized during various wars. Whether it’s a German collection that was carried off by the Red Army at the end of WWII, or the pillaging of the Iraqi National Museum in 2003 as American troops closed in, this show offers a…

Artists are underinformed about their rights. This lack of information is harmful to their interests, especially in terms of their interactions with other actors in the cultural ecosystem. The goal of this legal clinic is to provide advice and consultation for artists working in all media, by lawyers specializing in legal issues involving art. Since 2019, the Bureau des compagnies in Geneva has…

“The ground floor sitting room is connected to the rooms above by a stairway whose ramp is a shaky thing; you leap and fall from it; from it you speak up or take a running jump towards the chandelier. The first floor is reserved for the leads; it’s Olympus and the extras don’t venture up there. It’s up there that you pack your bags, where the gang meets, the mean tricks are planned out, and the…

Using a 1932 photomontage by John Heartfield, Vincent de Roguin offers us a critical and personal review of radical political imagery from the 20th century, from its mythological or revolutionary roots to its most regrettable contemporary reappropriations. Communist agitprop, Swiss fascism, German pop art, or British anarcho-punk, take your pick – Vincent de Roguin traces the history of…

Bringing together activist archives and artistic practices, the exhibition Essayer encore, rater encore, rater mieux interrogates the shared sensibilities and conceptual links between art and political activism. It encourages visitors to think about the current relevance of past struggles. Faced with the inertia and conformism of institutions with which various independent movements feel no…

Bringing together activist archives and artistic practices, the exhibition Essayer encore, rater encore, rater mieux (Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better) interrogates the shared sensibilities and conceptual links between art and political activism. It encourages visitors to think about the current relevance of past struggles. Faced with the inertia and conformism of institutions with which…

The 360° vision of dauphins, Swiss stone pine, Juwain’s philosophy, schizophrenia and sociopathic behaviors, a pasture on the ubac (that northern-facing shady side of mountains), Christmas crib figurine, and perfume – this is Flux Paranoïa. Bordering on the fields of act and performance, the project is a playful enthusiastic slapstick passage through questions of narrative, knowledge, and…

—– down with — down with the military regime!!! —– —– down with — down with the military regime!!! —– —– down with — down with the military regime!!! —– Cairo. The crowd. Preparation for an anti-colonialist revolt. As if shouting at the top of your lungs had ever made a difference. No, that’s for sure, but at least that unleashes passions, like the burning need for freedom. How can I put it to…

Here it’s a question of survival. At the foot of the wall of determinisms of an American society that was its dream ever more aggressively, a wave of artists unfurled and broke with unprecedented energy. Between superhuman verbosity, raw demands, resigned resilience, and reappropriation of the myth of the self-made man, American rappers have shot up in recent decades as a multitude of independent…

Greatest Hits is the name of Price’s debut pop album and performance concert (2015). The work deals with the nostalgic feelings of existing lyrics and melodies, embodied in mechanisms of mainstream pop, while attempting to explore the potential of musical and performative formats. The forms of his work, mutating through showrooms, galleries or clubs, are always experienced differently. He creates…

A kind of twilight, The Blue Hour provides the eponymous performance of Georg Keller (Zug/CH, 1980) with its metaphorical context. Creating three distinct figures, Keller elaborates a critique of the gamble that is the economy. A quick and sharp street vendor, aware that he is working illegally, does business out of sight of a department store salesperson, mechanically greeting potential…

The inaugural exhibition of the Rosa Brux collective art venue is devoted to the French artist Marie Reinert and the impossible connection generated by the adaptation of her work to the format of the monographic catalogue. The chance to rethink what in a performative practice like Reinert’s immediately renders the question of her archive problematic. The immersion she undertakes in each of her…

MONUMENT n. Latin monumentum. 1. A statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous person or notable event. A memorial, e.g., triumphal arch, column, trophy, etc. Monument to the dead, erected in memory of the dead from the same community, or victims of the same catastrophe. 2. A structure or stone erected, or pile of stones, which have a religious or symbolic value. 3. A…

Fusing synthetic polymorphism and the serendipity occasioned by his constant poking around in the social networks, Thomas Koenig plays with the plasticity of art materials to point up and enhance their formal and semantic mutability. First merely collecting objects, the artist then takes off from any one of a range of processes to create installations. The artifacts forming them are made visible…

This project is part of a process of remembrance that was launched in 2019 with the show titled Nous, saisonniers, saisonnières… (We Guest Workers). Originally mounted at Le Commun (Geneva, 2019), Nous, saisonniers, saisonnières… was shown some three years later in 2022 at the New Museum Biel (NMB, Biel/Bienne). Nous, saisonniers, saisonnières… brought to light a controversial episode from Swiss…

“Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?” In the poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” Bertolt Brecht laments the erasure of key actors in historical accounts. Isn’t the part played by the men and women who come to Switzerland from abroad to work also hidden away? In Biel and elsewhere, tens of thousands of guest…

“Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?” In the poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” Bertolt Brecht laments the erasure of key actors in historical accounts. When it comes to the boom in Geneva and Switzerland during the second half of the twentieth century, the role played by immigrant workers has been…

Rosa Brux and Oraibi (the traveling bookstore and curatorial facility based in Geneva) have invited over for a weekend the artist and designer Clémence Seilles, together with The Estate of Matt Montini, to come up with a display for a selection of books. Selected from its catalogue, the works are articulated around literary and artistic sources steeped in a refashioned pan-European…

In 2018, a legal advice clinic was held at Forde, which we organized in conjunction with Lab-of-Arts, an association made up of lawyers specializing in copyright law. Feeling at the time that criticism was no longer sufficient to advance the issues encountered on a daily basis by actors in the artistic world, support from the legal sector made it possible to offer a concrete solution and to bring…

Sugar, like the end of the world was waiting for us over by the fireside. Mornings I’m more of a coffee person. It wouldn’t change nothing, you know, if there’s liquid, I go all weak in the knees… Laura Gozlan, or like a certainty of the influence of gamma rays on the earth. — Why Stephen Hawking ? — Surely because he’s paradoxically ironic. — And why English? — Because a spoonful of sugar helps…

The inaugural event of this new season at Rosa Brux is the exhibition Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance. Using several photo installations, the show presents the artist Dorothée Baumann’s in-depth look at the founding and development of a fundamental research center in the cognitive neurosciences, the Brain & Behaviour Laboratory (BBL), located in Switzerland. Focusing on the study of human behavior,…

Enter the private world of XX, let your eyes feast all evening long on girls who can dish it out. Take the plunge into punk demands of the 1980s with Camille Lan’s video playlist Girls on Tape: Video Gems from the 80s, a video mix of clips, concerts, and talks that will send you right into the heart of female demands. And starting at 9 pm, the curtain rises on the documentary Sorcières, mes sœurs…

Protection Room is an exhibition in which five artists take over and live at “Rosa Brux,” which originally was an apartment. Protection Room explores nuances of transparency and opacity, and the thin line between the private and the public – questioning whether this line still exists. For a week the five artists will respond to different aspects and tactics of “hiding” and “covering over”…

Too intelligent, too beautiful, too strong, too much of a commie? Chantal Montellier has often been viewed a mix of fear and fascination – a fact that has caused her art to be relegated to second place in the history of her critical reception, when it should have garnered full attention. This exhibition aims at focusing on a highly prolific period in Montellier’s career, to firmly inscribe it…

Too intelligent, too beautiful, too strong, too much of a commie? Chantal Montellier has often been viewed a mix of fear and fascination – a fact that has caused her art to be relegated to second place in the history of her critical reception, when it should have garnered full attention. This exhibition aims at focusing on a highly prolific period in Montellier’s career, to firmly inscribe it…

Katrin Gattinger has carried out a number of actions, including working the area where the fields of drawing and performance meet. One has to do with the spatialization of a form and the other with granting that spatialization its capacity to be an event, and in this their meeting point becomes the point of political commitment by way of the graphic gesture. At Rosa Brux Gattinger is showing a…

Vestiges réels et factices, strates géologiques et mnémoniques s’entremêlent pour déconstruire les espaces liés à la modernité et au monde civilisé. Ana Vaz pose son regard sur l’histoire de l’évolution à travers une représentation alternative des utopies civilisatrices et architecturales passées. Son film « A Idade da Pedra » (L’Âge de Pierre) prend justement comme point de départ la…

Starting in the 1960s, a decade when the politicalization of a part of the art world went up against the institutional art authorities, many demands were put forward regarding the status and working conditions of artists. From the first contract including a clause protecting artists’ resale rights conceptualized by Seth Siegelaub with the help of Bob Projansky to the more recent campaigns…

The Particular Unity of Same and Other (an Amplitude) at Rosa Brux is the Swiss iteration of the eponymous exhibition currently running at Heden in The Hague, Netherlands. Both shows take shape around a recent trip Hendrikse made to Indonesia and reflect on the image that either precedes the foreigner, the outsider, or remains after they have left. The position of the foreigner is a crucial one,…

From the book as an exhibition space to the form that escapes from books and takes over the space. The publisher Théophile’s Papers brings together at Rosa Brux the work of four artists published under the venue name for this show, which resonates like an unknown transcription on paper. Taking as their starting point the very core of their publications, Christian Aschman, Baptiste Caccia,…

—“We oppose any political movement whose theories dare not cross the doorstep into private lives and whose members are revolutionaries in the street and sexists at home. For us, everything is political.”1 —“We want assisted reproductive technology, not kids.”2 —“There’s no other way to escape because there is no other territory, no other bank of the Mississippi, no Palestine or Liberia for women.…

Une exposition (An Exhibition) is a group exhibition of exhibitions of images exhibiting their condition of being images even though they could be archetypes of artworks. In other words, the exhibition is the image of the image that is projected of a work of art being but an image, an exhibition (hi)story. That is, there is in the projected images of the exhibition a story/history of artworks…

V.N.I (or U.I.V., unidentified voices) aims to join two women’s lives and voices, those of Bernadette Soubirous and a Belgian housewife, both witnesses who are heard, not seen. 3-8 invites you to listen to the underground rumors and oral accounts of meetings with extraterrestrials. Initially, you are invited to a screening of Lucile Desamory’s film Dark Matter, which takes us to 1989 and Belgium,…

Back after a series of exhibitions and events around Switzerland, the books that were awarded the Fernand Baudin Prize (prize for the most beautiful books in Brussels and French-speaking Belgium) will be on display at Rosa Brux in a retrospective show featuring all of the prize-winners, from 2008 right up to the present day. Along with these prize-winning books, the gallery will also be showing…

To confront the segregations imposed by the American cultural authorities during the 1980s, Group Material decided to temporarily convert the exhibition format into another cognitive mode. Their exhibitions, simultaneously complex and inclusive, mixed a variety of styles, ethnic groups, genders and sexual orientations in an attempt to abolish hierarchization in the art world and the domination…

To confront the segregations imposed by the American cultural authorities during the 1980s, Group Material decided to temporarily convert the exhibition format into another cognitive mode. Their exhibitions, simultaneously complex and inclusive, mixed a variety of styles, ethnic groups, genders and sexual orientations in an attempt to abolish hierarchization in the art world and the domination…

If 1968 is frequently associated with the rise of the protest movements of May, the year also marked the founding of a think tank that made a serious and sustained effort to define, from different, critical angle, the imbalances wrought by Consumer Society. Thus began the Club of Rome. While today it is almost banal to observe that the economic prosperity of societies based on growth is no longer…