Jubilee exhibition

The relationship between art and architecture is the topic, to which Ulrike Jehle Schulte Strathaus, founding director of the former Architecture Museum Basel, is dedicating the autumn exhibition, at the invitation of S AM director Hubertus Adam.

Today, the relationships between art and architecture are largely vague or blurred. Artists address space in installations and actions; architects, on the other hand, often see themselves as artists, legitimised by the attention paid to them worldwide in recent decades, which to no small extent is due to digital networking.

How do artists deal with architecture? How do they react to the built environment? The opening of the building, with Christo, was a clear indication how the museum's interests were oriented. This was followed by presentations with Charles Simonds and Rudolf Maeglin, photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Paolo Rosselli and Christian Vogt, and many others. Representatives of other disciplines, such as musicians and writers, also utilised and interpreted the spaces.

The counter-question, regarding how architects react to artists, shall now be the topic of the exhibition in autumn 2014. This is not about artworks that are put in place afterwards, or that come about thanks to percent-for-art projects demanded by the authorities. Instead, it is about the question of what emerges when artist and architect, in a lively exchange, develop a work together from the very start.