‘Ahoi, ahoi Des Admirals’ is a group exhibition dedicated to performance art with a three-day program of performances during Zurich Art Weekend from 07 – 09 June, 2024. Distinguished from other forms of art by the five elements: time, space, body and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public, this exhibition explores questions of curating, staging and collecting performance art.

The title derives from the simultaneous poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison a louer’ by Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck, performed at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on 31 March, 1916, just 500 meters from our gallery location. It was stimulated by the desire to apply the same simultaneous principles in poetry that the Surrealist painters – Picasso, Braque, Picabia, Duchamp-Villon and Delay – experimented with in the transmutation of objects and colors in the first Cubist paintings.

‘Ahoi, ahoi Des Admirals’ examines various forms of performance art in relation to…