Simon Castets – författare

Inspired by Le Corbusier's 1925 Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, the second exhibition in Swiss Institute's annual Architecture and Design series presents a prototype for the 21st-century home, simulating a living environment where the house moves beyond its physical confines and into the digital realm.

Complete documentation of the longest-running work from Hans Haacke's famous Poll seriesGerman artist and institutional critique pioneer Hans Haacke (born 1936) is famed worldwide for examining museums by directly asking their audiences questions. Hans Haacke: Swiss Institute Visitors Poll documents the results of his longest ever poll work, which was conducted at Swiss Institute from June 21, 2018 to October 24, 2019.Newly commissioned for this publication, Haacke's featured essay outlines the history of his poll works, discussing the context and development of this body of work over four decades—all leading up to the Swiss Institute Visitors Poll. The book documents the results of the poll, including 652 pages of facsimile index cards that were written by poll respondents in response to Question #20: “What multiple-choice question would you also have liked to see in this poll?”

The first ever overview of Pfeiffer's lively artistic output across mediums from the 1960s to the present, from A to ZPublished with Pacific.Inspired by the illustrated alphabets found in abecedariums, this new book on Walter Pfeiffer (born 1946) presents playful and illuminating insights into the Swiss artist’s practice from A to Z, annotated by Pfeiffer himself. The book also features new texts reflecting on five decades of Pfeiffer’s artistic output from an international group of curators, critics and writers. At once a meticulously crafted artist’s book and a comprehensive monograph, Walter Pfeiffer demonstrates the artist’s sustained commitment to exquisite, innovative publications.This book is part of Swiss Institute’s newly redesigned SI Series. Each book in the SI Series adds context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts.

The new shapes and sentiments that spill out from artist Shahryar Nashat’s artistic output of the last eight yearsBodies function, fight and fail. People bear witness to these processes every day, actively and passively, in the flesh and on-screen. But bodies are also unruly: they desire and shapeshift and betray. This oscillation between the realities of mortal progression and everything that transpires in those indeterminate zones serves as the basis for the visceral practice of Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat (born 1975).This monograph surveys Nashat’s artistic output of the last eight years. The book is copublished by Kunsthalle Basel and Swiss Institute, where Nashat had solo exhibitions. But, while the two exhibitions are the occasion for publishing this book, the contents here far surpass them: twelve of Nashat’s works made between 2012 and 2020 are examined across six essays and one conversation, each of which forges a new reading of what is at stake in the artist’s oeuvre.

In the “St. Petersburg gamble,” the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears. By conventional definitions, the St Petersburg gamble has an infinite potential return; nonetheless, most players feel that they should not risk more than a few dollars each time. Explaining why people offer such small sums for something with infinite potential remains contentious in both economics and philosophy. The St. Petersburg Paradox embodies Swiss Institute’s longstanding dedication to producing inventive group exhibitions, putting artists across a century (Marcel Duchamp, Ericka Beckman, Hans Arp, Amalia Ulman, Tabor Robak) in dialogue with each other to explore the precarious nature of gaming and the impulses that underlie the way risk is calculated.Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.