With the exhibition “William Forsythe: The Sense of Things” the Kunsthaus Zürich invites the public to preview the still unoccupied Kunsthaus extension whose architecture was designed by David Chipperfield. Artist and choreographer William Forsythe invites the visitors to take a choreographic tour of the new building. “The Sense of Things” can be experienced exclusively for four weeks (until May 24, 2021).

Curated by Mirjam Varadinis, ‘The Sense of Things’ encourages the visitor to build a direct relationship with the architecture that will house some of Kunsthaus Zürich’s most significant collections.

“In Forsythe’s acoustic intervention, deconsecrated church bells of different sizes, pitches, and timbres will be activated in a contrapuntal composition that is widely distributed across the spaces of the new extension. In considering Chipperfield’s building as an immense sounding-body, Forsythe proposes that visitors individually tune the composition via their perambulations through the new museum, thereby embodying his choreographic proposition.

Forsythe’s examination of visitor experience vis-à-vis the new architecture posits acoustics as an ever-present, but invisible facet of museum design that has significant effects upon those experiences. ‘The Sense of Things’ emphasizes the visitor’s curiosity as key to apprehending the composition’s ‘Klangfarben’, nuances which are shaped by each visitor’s unfolding, investigative relationship to the building’s natural acoustics.

With their new cooperation, Kunsthaus Zürich and Forsythe wish to offer the broadest possible public a place where, after tremendous social disruption, community can once again be recreated.”

(excerpt from the exhibition text).

William Forsythe: The Sense of Things / Kunsthaus Zürich. Preview of the Kunsthaus extension by David Chipperfield Architects. Press preview, April 22, 2021.

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