A celebration of a beloved artistic and social space on its fortieth anniversary.
Zurich's Shedhalle is a space for process-based art on the city's lakeshore. It was originally part of a former textile mill that was converted first into an assembly plant for telephones and radios, and in the early 1980s into a campus known as the Rote Fabrik (the red factory), hosting a theatre and concert hall, a restaurant and bar, studios for visual and performing artists, and art spaces. Since its inception in 1985, the Shedhalle has been a place where independent artists, communities, and activists come together and work. New exhibition formats, as well as artistic practices and forms of knowledge generation, have evolved here, often ahead of their time. They reflect different emancipatory and socio-critical concerns of their respective times.
Loving Shedhalle marks the venue's 40th anniversary. It reflects on its history, artistic and curatorial strategies, and social resonance chambers, and explores the concerns negotiated here over all these years. The book's title reflects the idea of love as an affective practice: causes are deeply interwoven with emotions, convictions, and decisions. At the Shedhalle, strategies and formats unfolded that aimed at making art effective beyond art itself.
The volume brings together voices from people involved with Shedhalle in various manners and roles, from the early days until the present. It highlights the place's visionary potential of four decades and explores how the presence is moved by echoes of the past that continue to give artistic, curatorial, and sociopolitical impulses.
Text in English and German.
AUTHORS: Michael Hiltbrunner is a Zurich-based cultural anthropologist, archive specialist, and curator. Carla Peca is a doctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich, working also as a freelance curator. Lucie Tuma is a choreographer, artist and author, currently working as a curator at Zurich's Shedhalle.
SELLING POINTS: .
Marks the 40th anniversary of Zurich's Shedhalle in November 2025 .
Gathers voices from four decades and current texts by people involved with Shedhalle .
Explores the visionary potential of 40 years of Shedhalle and its relationship to current artistic, curatorial, and sociopolitical causes .
Zurich's Shedhalle is a trailblazer of current efforts towards institutional change, a seismograph and resonance chamber for culturalpolitical tendencies .
Research as an artistic practice, combining art and activism as well as feminist, queer, and post-migrant and post-colonial critical attitudes have been core elements of the Shedhalle programme from the outset
160 colour, 27 b/w illustrations
