At the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, the Swiss Pavilion will present The Unfinished Business of Living Together, a timely and thought-provoking project commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Conceived by curators Gianmaria Andreetta and Luca Beeler with artist Nina Wakeford, and developed in collaboration with Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance, and Yul Tomatala, the exhibition examines coexistence as both a social promise and a site of ongoing conflict. Drawing on archival television debates from the late 1970s and 1980s and reactivating them through contemporary video, sound, and spatial installation, the project reframes the archive as a living, contested space—one in which unresolved questions of visibility, public speech, and social norms continue to shape how we live together today.
Commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the project takes coexistence as both a social promise and a contested form, mobilising art to reopen the archive as a site of intervention and active dispute. Rather than treating the archive as a stable record, the exhibition approaches it as a space in which unresolved social questions continue to circulate.
The project begins with voices from an April 1978 episode of the Swiss public television programme Telearena, in which the so-called ‘problem of homosexuality’ was debated live on air. The broadcast marked one of the first moments in which individuals identifying as homosexual addressed a national television audience in Switzerland, catalysing alliances between lesbian and gay communities beyond subcultural contexts. This moment was revisited six years later by the francophone talk show Agora (1984), which connected Swiss, French, and Canadian audiences via satellite. Both programmes relied on live sketches written by television drama departments to stimulate debate and to prompt audience responses rooted in personal experience.
For the artistic team of 2026, the challenges of living together remain unresolved and continue to take very different forms. Efforts toward social change still compete with established norms and institutionalised systems of exclusion and silence. Within this framework, homosexuality serves as one historically specific entry point for examining how social norms determine who is able to speak publicly and who is heard. These debates reveal broader patterns, from state security regimes and surveillance to moral panics around the nuclear family, in which forms of difference are cast as threats to social order.
At its centre, the exhibition stages a spatialised video production that combines archival footage with newly produced image and sound. Extending into the Pavilion’s garden, the installation explores the risks of intimacy in public space, the anchoring of memory in place, and the archive as a living resource for multiple narratives. By revisiting and re-enacting the formal mechanisms of television talk shows, the exhibition works through montage and installation to open wider questions around media infrastructures and public discourse.
Artistic group: Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, Nina Wakeford, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance und Yul Tomatala
Commissioners: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: Katharina Brandl, Sandi Paucic, Rachele Giudici Legittimo
Exhibition dates: 9th May to 22nd November, 2026. Find more information about the Swiss Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2026 here.
