The historic building in Kramgasse is housing a collection of artworks commissioned or acquired by LUKOWA Group, a Lucerne-founded conglomerate dealing with food, technology, and real estate. The collection was conceived in 2023 in relation to the company’s interests, with a consideration of world-building -- a responsibility that art and corporations, ultimately, share. The collection brings together some of the topics that come from corporate language, which are however prerequisite to navigating life itself. They include matters of production, prediction, economy, care, ecology, circumstances, risk, faith, and luck. 

Selected artworks tell their story in conversation with the architecture that has been left untouched, formerly belonging to a department store and to various businesses in its centuries-long past. The interior is a relic of the recently outdated shopping-mall aesthetic, along with the escalators, the purposefully mounted walls and the custom-made furniture that stayed inside. As a temporary host to the collection, the building brings its past forward and confronts the mundane with the mystical. The invited curator observes how these overlaps are, in fact, the less obvious layers of a seemingly fixed corporate anatomy: the willingness to think in risky, intuitive, or speculative ways in a system that seems to be run by calculation.

Artworks by:

Anna-Sophie Berger, Olivia Bax, Francesco Cagnin, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Lidija Delić, Hadassah Emmerich, Igor Eškinja, Rodrigo Hernandez, Yannic Joray, Šejla Kamerić, Dominique Knowles, Lorenza Longhi, Marie Matusz, Franco Mazzucchelli, Emi Mizukami, Matthias Noggler, Marko Obradović, Kern Samuel, Damir Sobota, Jan Vorisek, Angharad Williams, Bruno Zhu

The show is open from October 5th til November 30th, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 1-7 PM.

Above: Kramgasse 2, photo by Claude Barrault;

Below: photos by Claude Barrault (from left to right: 3, 6, 10, 14, 19, 20, 25); rest of the photos below: Julian Blum