% for Art: Regulating Civic Space in Zurich
Coumba Samba: The National Expo
24 September – 28 November 2025
gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
Opening: 23 September, 6 pm
The confines of capitalist society are erosive threats. At once deteriorative, transformative, and all but metaphoric, capitalism’s failed prophecies of progress encroach their way onto everyday life. The state takes up their charge—the choice to be a redistributive mechanism hovers around its relentless commitment to seek and induce control. It finds / fights its way into language, labor, desire, and the ideological apparatuses it sustains.
“oh lord isn’t that a further principle? polyurethane resin and I’m on my way to fight the law for what they did to leisure”[i]
On a relational scale, let’s think of the built environment as one of these apparatuses, and, as somewhat of a theater. With it, there are conditions that are human-made, often architectural, that provide a setting for human activity, shaping, fulfilling, or deferring, choices, and needs based on a set of cues. Where does the role of public art fall within the realm of civic space? As a stimulant of culture, access, public discourse, and congregation, or as a development, economic, and policing strategy veiled at its expense, advanced through urban planning and design? The exhibition % for Art: Regulating Civic Space in Zurich at gta exhibitions signals these instabilities into a duet: a pairing between a presentation of documents from historical archives about public artworks in Zurich’s built environment, displayed within an installation by artist Coumba Samba titled The National Expo.
We are in a room within a room where Samba questions our everyday interactions with public objects, considering the often incongruous relationships between form, civic space, and surveillance. The title % for Art departs from the legislation to commission and support a certain quota of artistic projects in public space. Under programme director André Bideau, students at ETH Zurich completed ten comparative case studies based on their findings in the extensive holdings of the gta archives. The case studies highlight questions raised by art-in-architecture works in Zurich and turning points in the urbanisation process within the interrelated fabric of urban development, construction projects, key political moments and artistic concepts, from historicism to modernism to the more recent present.
Samba’s interdisciplinary practice is drawn to objects that exist as signifiers of histories and national identity. These meanings complexify with biographical and nostalgic attachments to material, and although they contain life forces that are concealed, they retain their aesthetic integrity, hidden in plain sight: radiators, blinds, dirt, traffic markers, paper, fish tanks, filing cabinets. In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, poet and writer Eunsong Kim calls out, “Aesthetic debates concerning form, such as those around found object, appropriation, and conceptual art, as well as new and experimental poetry, are property concerns.”[ii] Another significant pair within the exhibition—hue and surface—emerges from Samba’s exacting selection of color. For the artist, color might be a property concern, too. The filing cabinets in the space showcasing the archival documents are color coded using pantone pastels extracted from around the city of Zurich. The scattered bollards around the gallery are painted in car colors taken from incidents of vehicle ramming attacks during the George Floyd Protests Rebellion of 2020 in the United States. Samba’s color codes are measures of drama; one concerning incendiary revolt and uprising catalyzed by the killing of Black people at the hands of police, another the recurring textures of a city’s urban environment. Neither is a singular occurrence.
Samba’s experimental display takes the archival beyond its institutionally-determined meanings, relying not on text or discourse to support how to read its significance, against an abundance of materials, but on sculpture. A series of monochromatic pastel flat file cabinets containing these selections, placed 1.2 meters apart for wheelchair accessibility, sit among various shapes of aesthetically solid scattered bollards, barricades, cubes, and spheres. Imposing forms that are historically mobilized to direct traffic, as anti-car ramming structures, pedestrian traffic control, and in larger volume, as counterterrorism initiatives for “public safety.” Within the gallery, what undermines or heightens sculpture’s value is its positioning or spatial orientation, and here, there is a porousness between the interior hold and exterior edges of the gallery itself—more than half of the gallery’s walls are glass, through which you can see into the installation as you approach it. The work is set against a backdrop of seeing in relation also to what is already there, an ever-shifting setting that reconfigures the experience of the work: natural light, reflections, or trees. There is a processual aspect to it—think Roni Horn’s Things That Happen Again, Pair Object VII (For a Here and a There), 1986–88 multiplied—its variation in identity based on the way it’s installed, and how we move around it. The exhibition muses on how we move two-fold; unsettling certainty in the choreographies of leisure, “crime,” rebellion, power, and privacy, within civic space as a site of participation or surveillance.
On the walls, there are submissions found in the archive of architectural renderings for a colorful city, proposals to make Zurich brighter. Archival and architectural remnants from ETH Zurich’s research are set further into juxtaposition as physical encounters in the gallery, such as an enamel piece from the drafting of an artwork for a train station, and large-scale fragments of designer Charlotte Schmid’s (one of the only women featured in the two-centuries worth of archives) work for a public swimming pool, whereby she made massive flowers in polyester resin. An accompanying exhibition brochure interpolates these case studies further. In dialogue with Samba’s The National Expo, do these archival pairings, so solid, signify architectural value, or loss?
Lingering on positionality and spectatorship, the country of Switzerland is often perceived as a permanent observer; neutral. A particularly homogeneous inclination towards culture projected onto a principle of Swiss foreign policy that ensures independence, the inviolability of its territory, and vice versa. Is it an argument, or an attitude? Samba’s The National Expo coarsens this sentiment a bit and renders it diffuse, dragging it along with how the U.S., opposingly, is seen as (and acts as) anything but. % for Art: Regulating Civic Space in Zurich, Coumba Samba: The National Expo is a document of urban transformation, and an exchange of provocations and antagonisms intervened upon by how we define value, material or ideological.
Text by Angelique Rosales Salgado
Coumba Samba (b. 2000, New York, US). Selected solo exhibitions include deutschland, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, DE (2025); Red Gas, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2024); Capital, Cell Project Space, London, UK (2024); and Couture, Galerina, London, UK (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Undermining the Immediacy, MMK, Frankfurt, DE (2025); ZONE, Reena Spaulings, New York, US (2024); A Crooked World, Drei, Cologne, DE (2023); Slow Dance (3), Stadtgalerie, Bern, CH (2023); Ways of Living 3.0, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2023); Hello, Galerina, London, UK (2022).
Angelique Rosales Salgado (Ciudad de México, México) is a curator and writer based in New York City. Their curatorial, research, and creative practice is grounded in queer study, and focuses on performance, experimental dance, collective work, and time-based media. Currently they are Assistant Curator at The Kitchen, and have held curatorial positions at Pioneer Works, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Select projects include PROTECT THE PEACE: we, INSURGENT (2024, The Kitchen), JJJJJerome Ellis: Aster of Ceremonies (2024, The Kitchen), Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art (2024-2025, The Kitchen, with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE (2024, The Kitchen), NIC Kay: The last gasp of the angry yt man (2024, Dia Chelsea), Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica (2024, The Kitchen, Video Viewing Room), Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station (2023, The Kitchen, Dia:Beacon), Leslie Cuyjet: With Marion (2023, The Kitchen), Christelle Oyiri: OBLIMEMBER (2023, The Kitchen, Video Viewing Room).
The exhibition is curated by André Bideau, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
A collaboration between The Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in History and Theory of Architecture, gta archives and gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich.
With contributions by the MAS students of 2024 and 2025: Elias Baumgarten, Marlon Brownsword, Yannick Charpié, Alica Clemens, Fabian Diem, Tuba Edis, Patrick Goldinger, Bernhard Geiger, Tobias Güller, Franz Handrik, Marion Häni Schnarrenberger, Jean-Marc Hensch, Verena Jehle, Martin Klinger, Manuela König, Bernard Kümmerli, Joanna Lewanska, Henriette Lutz, Marie Lutz, Romana Martic, Rahel Mor, Peter Näf, Yosuke Nakamoto, Ariana Pradal, Corine Räz, Anette Schick, Nora Tahiraj, Gani Turunc.
This exhibition is indebted to the Artist-in-Residence Program made possible by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation.
Curatorial assistant: Mina Hava
Production: Melinda Bieri and Ivana Milenković with Flora Bühlmann, Ben Frei, Ella Mathys, Lauro Nächt, Till Kadler, Margaux Koch Goei, Lucas Lenzin, Julian Volken, Vitus Michel, Eva Tschopp and Philipp Stäheli
Painting works: Arsim Aliu & Team
Graphic design: Teo Schifferli, Vivien Pöhls, Pascal Kaegi
[i] Benjamin Krusling, Glaring (New York: Wendy’s Subway, 2020), 98.
[ii] Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 9.
