Conference

20 - 22 March 2025

Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Rereadings and New Perspectives

An international conference at Museum Tinguely in Basel. Organized by Dr. Sandra Beate Reimann with Roland Wetzel, Dr. Andres Pardey, Annja Müller-Alsbach, Tabea Panizzi and Andrea Absenger.


To mark the centenary of Jean Tinguely’s birth, in 2025 Museum Tinguely in Basel will host an academic conference from March 20 to 22, 2025 The conference aims to initiate, encourage, discuss, and publish new art-historical research as well as interdisciplinary studies on the work of Tinguely and his circle. The conference’s main objective is to update and critically examine Tinguely’s art in terms of contemporary issues, theories, and discourse.

Although Tinguely experienced his breakthrough as an artist in 1959 and was successfully pursuing an international career by 1960, his work has played a subordinate role in art-historical research for a long time. It was not until the first and especially the second decade of the twenty-first century that his work began to be studied and contextualized in art-historical research as well as in exhibition projects and accompanying catalog publications. Many aspects of his oeuvre have not been explored extensively or have yet to be examined at all. The artist’s pioneering achievements (including performativity, dissolution of sculpture into ephemeral occurrences, choice of material and criticism of consumerism, interactivity, and immersive situations), which in the late 1950s already had a decisive influence on the development and understanding of art, are not well known, considering that writing on the history of sculpture is essentially focused on the development of Minimalism and Postminimalism. At the same time, changes in discourse (performativity and event terms, actor-network theory, and machine concepts) provide scholars with an opportunity to view Tinguely’s work from a contemporary perspective and, most of all, to challenge it critically (especially in terms of gender, postcolonial discourse, as well as animal ethics and aesthetics). With this call, the Museum Tinguely would like to create a platform for the newest research on Tinguely’s oeuvre and inspire scholars to consider it in new ways.

The programme of the conference will be communicated by the end of the year. 

>> Call for Papers


2023 - 8 February 2025

La roue = c'est tout. New permanent exhibition

According to Tinguely, ‘we live in a wheeled civilisation’. Even today, our lives are shaped largely by the relationship between man and machine and the resulting dependencies that Tinguely deconstructed with such relish. Now, for the first time since the museum was founded, its enlarged collection of Tinguely’s own works is to return to the great hall. There visitors will be able to discover the intricate and poetic early works, the explosive happenings and collaborations of the 1960s, and the musical, monumental and sombre works of Tinguely’s late period, all presented in an entertaining and eventful tour with many opportunities for hands-on participation.


>> To the exhibition
>> Calendar of events