Indigenous Futures and Urban Rituals: Jeffrey Gibson in Zurich

A radical remix of Indigenous craft, urban ritual and colour-soaked abstraction – Jeffrey Gibson lands in Zurich with a monumental art intervention that reframes the city’s cultural compass.

From 13 June 2025, the Chipperfield-designed Haefner Foyer at Kunsthaus Zürich becomes something more than a museum entrance. It becomes a living, breathing artwork – a stage, a meeting point, a portal. BOSHULLICHI / INLƲCHI – WE WILL CONTINUE TO CHANGE, the new site-responsive installation by acclaimed US artist Jeffrey Gibson, brings bold colour, pattern and performance into the civic bloodstream of Zurich – free to all, no ticket required.

Fresh from representing the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and ahead of a major public commission for the Met in New York, Gibson’s Zurich takeover marks his first in-situ work for a European museum. Think: kaleidoscopic textiles, ceramics, fringe, jingles, beadwork, painted canvas and sculptural forms layered with cultural commentary – a remix of visual languages that dissolves the borders between Indigenous tradition, Western modernism and the contemporary avant-garde.

Drawing on Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, Gibson metabolises symbols, rituals and material processes from powwow regalia and pan-Indigenous visual culture, weaving them into a global lexicon of abstraction, performance and storytelling.

His installations don’t just occupy space – they transform it. This is no static sculpture park, but a living zone of change, a maximalist expression of community, identity and visibility.

Inside the Haefner Foyer, Gibson’s sprawling visual vocabulary unfolds across wall, floor and form – painting, sculpture, screen-printing, textiles and ceramics collide in an all-encompassing, sensorial artwork designed to hold space for interaction, movement and performative encounters. Inspired by Concrete Art and Zurich’s Dadaist pulse, as well as Swiss vernacular carnival traditions, Gibson’s intervention becomes a dialogue – between history and future, craft and fine art, Zurich and the world.

The work’s title carries the dual energy of destruction and rebirth. Boshullichi – to break apart and transform. InlƲchi – to rebuild anew. Both Choctaw words for change, layered into an immersive call to collective reimagining. Gibson’s installation asks how we navigate this fractured world – and answers with joy, resilience, and radical beauty.

Open until the end of 2026, the foyer commission is also a bold statement of public access. No velvet ropes. No paywalls. Just art for everyone. In line with Chipperfield’s architectural vision of a ‘roofed town square’, this is a city centre space reimagined as a platform for culture, encounter and urban solidarity – a modern agora shaped by movement, colour and community.

And when the colour fades and you’re ready for quiet, slip away to Signau House & Garden – The Aficionados’ Zurich pick – where soft Bauhaus curves, leafy calm and understated elegance slow the pace in the city’s artsy Riesbach quarter. A nine-room bolthole for the aesthetically inclined, it’s just the tonic after Gibson’s visual voltage.

Born in Colorado Springs and raised across the US, UK, Korea and Germany, Gibson is both global and deeply rooted. He’s a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, with Cherokee ancestry, and holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Royal College of Art. His work speaks to multiplicity – a layered, luminous push against categorisation.

Curated by Abigail Winograd – co-director of Pueblo Unido Gallery and a driving force behind Gibson’s Venice Pavilion exhibition – the Zurich installation is supported by a Zurich-based cultural foundation and the Gateway Fund, which champions large-scale public art.

Gibson’s work reshapes space into something less expected – a living dialogue of heritage, rebellion and reimagined form, grounded in the here and now.