Kitchen Exhibition
Vol. 1 Raw

Curator
Private Kitchen, Zurich, 2026

Kitchens have one objective: to prepare and cook food. They thus hold inherent structural and functional conditions as well as implications of labour and rituals. Historically, the kitchen used to be the warm core of the house. To some extent, it has maintained this position today: it is a space for spontaneous encounters and long conversations. New friendships are formed in kitchens during late-night parties. In short, it is the home’s magnet, where people naturally gather.

The Kitchen Exhibition series moves art into kitchens. It captures the notion of the kitchen as a place where people come together, creating new meaning through the interplay between space and work.

In the series’ first Volume Raw, the kitchen appears as a primarily functional room. Its built-in structures become overly present. Missing any personal items or even utensils, it becomes a dreamlike idea of a place, reduced to its raw form. Within this kitchen, the artists Svenja Gansner and Nicolae Zamsa investigate the fine line between indulgence and disgust through sculpture, painting and text.

In her work, Gansner seamlessly shifts between the everyday object, the grotesque and the abject. She questions how we relate to disgust and the irritation of object displacement. When do we feel affection, when rejection? 

Zamsa explores the theme of bodily sustenance through the myths of vampirism. Behind the mask of melodrama and horror, his works turn vampires into metaphors for feelings of loss, grief and eternal denial. 

People have been interested in moving art into kitchens for a long time. Two references for me are the illegal literature readings and art exhibitions in kitchens in the 1950s Soviet Union, as well as Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s famous 1991 kitchen show.