Luma Westbau is pleased to present the next chapter of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, devoted to Maria Lassnig (1919–2014). Born in rural Southern Austria, Lassnig pursued a 70-year career in painting, drawing, and animated film, pioneering the concept of Body Awareness and engaging deeply with feminist concerns.

For the first time in one setting, this exhibition brings together the complete video interviews between Maria Lassnig and Hans Ulrich Obrist, accompanied by their extensive correspondence in chronological order. Featured works include selected paintings from The Broken Mirror (Vienna, 1993) and the Serpentine Gallery exhibition (London, 2008), the ‘Safety Curtain’ (Vienna State Opera project, 2005), as well as paintings and watercolours presented in Athens (2017). Alongside the biographical film Ballad of Maria Lassnig, Selfportrait (1971) highlights her pioneering experiments in animation within the 1970s New York feminist art scene.

Echoing the phrase “Living with art stops one wilting!” from her final unfinished letter to Hans Ulrich Obrist, this show honours the vibrant legacy of a painter whose interior visions continue to reverberate across our bodies and souls.

Opening: 12 June 2026
Exhibition: 13 June – 20 December 2026
Location: schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zurich

To mark its 40th anniversary, Swiss Institute revisits Regift, the landmark 2009 exhibition originally organised at SI in New York by John Miller. Co-produced by Swiss Institute and Luma Foundation, the anniversary edition is presented at Luma Westbau, bringing together original participants alongside an expanded selection of artists whose practices engage with questions of generosity, exchange, and value in contemporary contexts, with over 40 artists across two floors reflecting four decades of SI’s programme and international networks.

The original Regift exhibition examined systems of gift exchange and their relationship to economic structures, social reciprocity, and the ways in which gifts bind relations of mutual obligation. The exchange of gifts, though an ancient and widespread practice, remains an economic anomaly. Gift exchange resists a logic of pure equivalence. Like an artwork itself, a gift inhabits a space of incalculability: one shaped by unspoken obligations and reciprocities that are emotional, social, and hierarchical as much as material. Regift takes this premise as a point of departure, proposing that the artwork and the gift share a fundamental resistance to being fully accounted for within systems of measurable value.

In this new iteration, on the occasion of SI’s 40^th anniversary, Regift will broaden its scope to consider the rituals surrounding gift giving and the celebratory occasions that prompt such exchanges, from birthdays and anniversaries to communal and spiritual observances. The exhibition will also look beyond Western paradigms of exchange to consider global practices of giving, such as offerings made to ancestors, and acts of planting or dedicating gifts toward future generations. Through these expanded lenses, Regift will explore how gifts, both material and symbolic, mediate relationships across time, culture, and economy, while continuing to challenge the boundaries between generosity and obligation, value and meaning. 

As an added component to this exploration of gifting, the exhibition will explore artistic ecosystems of donation and support by functioning as a fundraiser for SI.

A programme of public events and newly commissioned performances extends the exhibition’s inquiry into participation, reciprocity, and collective experience, activating audiences across generations.

Opening: 12 June 2026
Exhibition: 13 June – 6 September 2026
Location: 2 & 3rd Foor, Luma Westbau, Zurich