The Bally Foundation is pleased to announce the imminent opening of its new headquarters at Villa Heleneum in Lugano on April 20, 2023. This opening marks the beginning of a new important phase in the foundation’s evolution. After 17 years, it will finally have a permanent home in an exceptional location on the shores of Lake Lugano. Since 2006, the foundation’s mission has been to promote art and culture by highlighting themes important to Bally, such as innovation, support for creativity, and environmental awareness.
Throughout its history, Bally has demonstrated a committed social vision and a great willingness to work closely with artists, architects, graphic designers and creatives of all origins. Today, thanks to the Foundation, the story continues through a diversified artistic and cultural offer, which aims to support creativity in all its forms and in particular to support young artists with, among other things, a residency program, and to involve a wide audience around the Foundation’s project, including the local and international community as well as the cultural and academic institutions.
Since November 2022, Vittoria Matarrese has taken over the management of the foundation. With Vittoria’s appointment, the foundation’s program focuses on contemporary art and creativity through exhibitions and events, bringing together emerging and established artists. In the near future, the residency program will also aim to strengthen links with the site’s area, gardens and history, welcoming artists from all over the world. Links with the region and local institutions will be developed through specific initiatives, starting with increased collaboration with the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana (The Art Museum of Italian Switzerland or MASI).
Bringing together more than twenty international artists, Un Lac inconnu proposes a poetic and philosophical walk between submerged and emerged landscapes, an attempt to give form to the water that slips through our fingers and yet traces a furrow. A proposal to connect with oneself and the world.
The inaugural exhibition was curated by Vittoria Matarrese and runs from April 20 to September 24, 2023. Featured artists include: Vito Acconci, Wilfrid Almendra, Caroline Bachmann, Oliver Beer, Mathias Bensimon, Angela Bulloch, Ligia Dias, Adélaïde Feriot, Karim Forlin, Tania Gheerbrant, Petrit Halilaj & Álvaro Urbano, Yannick Haenel, Rebecca Horn, Paul Maheke, Hélène Muheim, Mel O’Callaghan, Philippe Parreno, Elise Peroi, Constant Puyo, Emilija Škarnulytė, Haim Steinbach, and Willa Wasserman.
The inaugural exhibition is already an invitation to experience the evocative power of the surrounding nature, to discover its ability to inspire imagination and create persistent images, to penetrate dormant and deep waters, maternal or troubled, to transform the boundaries between exterior and interior into thin membranes, to walk in our intimate gardens, our immersed landscapes. Un lac inconnu, an unknown lake, is the search for a common vibration between what is happening inside and outside of these gardens drawn in eyeshadow by Hélène Muheim, engraved by Willa Wasserman, or woven by Elise Peroi, in which the giant forsythias of Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano protect us from emotional storms and where we can come across the half-human, half-vegetal figures of Vito Acconci, the winged flower of Wilfrid Almendra, and the animated/animist objects of Rebecca Horn. An exploration of the subconscious, as in Paul Maheke’s work, of the cracks and images that inhabit us, voices that haunt us like those from Tania Gheerbrant’s sculpture, Yannick Haenel’s story, or Adelaide Fériot’s choir, just as wonderful as they are troubling. If Mathias Bensimon’s fresco allows us to have a speculative vision of the lake, Oliver Beer’s painting or Ligia Dias’s sculpture have gone to the very depths of water to find the elements that compose them, while Mel O’Callaghan’s liquid objects make the breaths resonate deep within us. Facing the lake, under the lake, we are the solitary explorers of the vestiges of the landscape and of our memories, as well as Caroline Bachmann, Emilija Škarnulytė or Karim Forlin, creating a bridge, a breach that allows us to enter closer to a territory, its history and myths. In a superposition of narrative and temporal frames, we go through the Villa as we go through a personal diary.
CEO of Bally
President of the Bally Foundation
Director of the Bally Foundation
3 curtains 135 x 370 cm, 4 panels: 135 x 400 cm
Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Sultana, Paris
Lamp (white plastic sphere), daylight bulb, electric cable, switch, metal plate, ⌀ 30 cm
Photo © Annik Wetter
Courtesy of MAMCO, Genève
Photo © Gerald Petit
Courtesy of the artist
Photo © Aurélien Mole
Courtesy of the artist & galerie Ceysson & Bénétière, Paris
Photo © Gregor Staiger
Courtesy the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich
Photo © Margot Montigny – CACC
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist
wood, skai, gold aluminium, glass lens, tablet, colour video 3 min (loop)
Photo © Salim Santa Lucia
Courtesy of the artist
Volcanic stone, rock crystal, engine, pedestal, 43 x 27 x 16 cm
Photo © Agostino Osio
Courtesy Giancarlo et Danna Olgiati Collection, Lugano
Polyester, jewelry and discarded objects, everyday found objects, light devices, silver paint, gold leaf, silk, cork, crystal, glass
275 x 250 x 150cm
Photo © Annik-Wetter
Courtesy of the artist & Frac Normandie
Courtesy of the artist
Photo © Nicolas Delaroche
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist & High Art, Paris
Courtesy of the artist
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP
Performance with breaths in dielectric glass, 20 minutes
Photo © Clemens Habicht
Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Allen, Paris
