Agenda

For more than forty years, the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich has held the Tibetan collections of Austrian mountaineers Heinrich Harrer (1912-2006) and Peter Aufschnaiter (1899-1973) and the expedition collections of Heinrich Harrer from the 1960s. On 17 May 1944 they reached the Tibetan plateau. Seven years later they left the city of Lhasa, each with its own collection of ethnographic everyday and ritual objects, numerous black and white photographs, hand-drawn maps and sketches, and hundreds of pages of diary entries and notes. For the first time, this exhibition establishes a link between these collections. This offers the opportunity to understand Harrer and Aufschnaiter as actors in specific historical constellations, embedded in networks of different relationships, and as a shortened cultural-historical map of Tibet.

Tiffany Chung excavates in ruins and urban waste to reveal objects. The objects that Chung encounters in her archaeological research aren’t necessarily exceptional things. They are rather trivial witnesses of an everyday and bygone life, which still resonates within the objects. Thủ Thiêm, an old city quarter of Saigon (Vietnam), was once a lively quarter, which was overwritten with a master plan of the urban space, an exhaustive transformation which leaves nothing as it was before and destroys the social structures.  This master plan is a tabula rasa and effaces history. This is met by the artist with a different plan: an artistic cartography which captures the spiritual and historical dimensions of a place.

Glaciers, densely populated by seals, endless Sahara dunes or mist-covered mountains in the Amazon rainforest: Sebastião Salgado (1944) depicts the earth as a creation of overwhelming beauty and thus sharpens our awareness of its preciousness. Salgado has sailed across oceans, scaled mountains, and crossed deserts. He has observed animals and met indigenous peoples in his endeavor to capture their environment and culture. The exhibition is a manifesto that not only touches visitors with black-and-white photographs, but also raises open questions about how we deal with the planet.