Exhibitions
Thomas Hirschhorn and the construction of a personal atlas
The Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur presents a comprehensive retrospective of Thomas Hirschhorn's career, beginning with My Atlas (2025), a work conceived as a personal interpretation of the idea of an atlas and as a point of connection between different periods of his artistic production. The exhibition brings together works created from the early 1980s to the present and offers an approach to the complexity of a practice marked by accumulation, the association of images, and reflection on the social and political dimensions of art.
Born in Bern and raised in Davos, Hirschhorn studied at the Zurich University of the Arts and began to gain international recognition in the mid-1990s with installations that challenge traditional forms of image presentation and circulation. Since 1984, he has lived and worked in Paris, where he has developed a body of work deliberately situated in a borderland between art, popular culture, philosophy, and politics.
Photo: Yanik Bürkli © 2026, ProLitteris, Zürich.
The concept of the atlas occupies a central place in this exhibition. Hirschhorn takes as his reference point Aby Warburg's celebrated Mnemosyne Atlas , understood not so much as a closed system of classification as as an open space of relationships, correspondences, and associations between images. In My Atlas , this methodology is transformed into an autobiographical and artistic tool that allows for a dialogue between works separated by time, revealing continuities, obsessions, and connections that run throughout his career.
More than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition offers a cross-sectional reading of Hirschhorn's work. The pieces are linked by a network of relationships that reveals the persistence of certain concerns and, at the same time, the artist's ability to address social and political issues using a wide variety of materials, languages, and strategies. The result is a personal cartography in which memory, thought, and images constantly intertwine.
In this sense, My Atlas allows us to approach a body of work that understands art as a space for confrontation and collective thought. The accumulation of materials and references, characteristic of many of its installations, is not merely a response to a desire for visual saturation, but rather to the construction of a territory in which images can generate new connections and interpretations. The atlas thus becomes a way of ordering the world without closing off its complexity.
The exhibition, which can be visited from August 22 to December 6, 2026, is curated by Stephan Kunz and offers the possibility of contemplating Hirschhorn's career from a global perspective, paying attention both to the formal evolution of his work and to the social, political and critical dimension that runs through it.
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