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Thinking Through Weibel gathers key works out of the Peter Weibel Archive, held by the Collection and Archive at the University of Applied Arts and positions them in relation to contemporary practices by invited international artists, that unfold through distinct conceptual and material approaches. Their contributions do not follow or extend Peter Weibel’s logic, but move across and against it, forming intersections without fixing relationships. Attention turns particularly to Weibel’s earlier years, when sculptural inquiries merged with performance, film, and written language. That early period reveals a restless movement across mediums and media, driven by a desire to test the limits of perception and to upend disciplinary borders. The presentation highlights the entwined currents of politics, sexuality, and playfulness that animate Weibel’s experiments. Performative actions, text works, and spatial propositions from Weibel’s early practice appear alongside the works of the participating artists. These juxtapositions are not structured as reflections or responses. Rather, they allow for a set of overlapping gestures, divergences, and refusals. The exhibition stands as an open field where inquiry coexists with irreverent disruption, underscoring how creative freedom remains inseparable from sociopolitical stakes. Thinking Through Weibel emerges as both encounter and departure. It is, at once, an effort to dwell within the experimental urgencies that animated Weibel’s creative and intellectual life, and a movement beyond those urgencies toward possibilities he could not, and perhaps would not, fully account for. The exhibition offers an engagement with Weibel’s practices – his modes of making, his orientations toward materiality, medium, technology and form – as a way of apprehending the contours of his self-making. Yet, it simultaneously demands a thinking through the structures that conditioned his interventions: to traverse the Western epistemological frames that shaped his project and to imagine alongside traditions, practices, and intellectual itineraries that move otherwise. In doing so, it invites an inquiry not into a closed legacy, but into the open-endedness of artistic thought across and against imposed boundaries. Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Thania Petersen, Eva Schlegel, and Peter Weibel Curated by Valerie Messini and Brooklyn J. Pakathi Opening hours: Mon–Fri 11:00–18:00 Guided Tours: 14 Nov, 17:30 27 Nov, 17:00 11 Dec, 17:00 8 Jan, 17:00
