If I Were A Bird - Book Launch with accompanying exhibition
Zurich, Switzerland, 2026
At loop, Weststrasse 118, Zurich
The exhibition opens with a conversation between Dhanya Rajaram (art historian/curator) and myself, moderated by Sandi Paucic (art historian, art educator and curator).
The publication was made possible with the kind financial support of the STEO Foundation (2000) and the Kosmos Cultural Foundation, and will be presented at loop, the project space of the Pool architecture practice.
About the publication
IF I WERE A BIRD
Rahel Hegnauer (*1968, Zurich) has compiled almost all of her temporary site-specific works from the past 30 years into a portfolio.
It is her attempt to thus preserve them from transience.
She works predominantly in public, urban or rural spaces, and her projects engage with the specific context of the respective exhibition venue. Place and work belong together.
Places that no longer exist
In the urban space of Zurich in the late 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, she realised installations and interventions in abandoned industrial buildings or housing estates released for temporary use. All these places no longer exist.
What spaces and places reveal
In the years that followed, when she frequently applied for artist-in-residence programmes abroad (particularly in India), it was the spatial, social, historical or political context of each location that interested her and guided her work in a particular direction.
In the publication IF I WERE A BIRD (self-published), which she designed and produced, Rahel Hegnauer now offers a comprehensive insight into her artistic practice. The works are documented in detail with images and text. In addition to her introduction, Ralph Hauswirth (artist, CH), Dhanya Rajaram (IN) and Sandi Paucic (CH) have each contributed a text to the book.
At the opening, the presentation of the publication will be complemented by the introduction into one of her projects (“Koudhi”, a kind of quilt), which she realised in Bangalore in 2008 in collaboration with Dhanya Rajaram, Lakshmi and Boppamma – two women from an informal settlement. In addition to the book presentation, the exhibition will feature an object (quilt), three photographic works and several film works – most of which have never or rarely been shown in public.
(For more on the individual works, see the exhibition catalogue)
IF I WERE A BIRD
ISBN 978-3-033-11812-6
(Also available in bookshops)