RECOLLECTION: CASPER FAASSEN - SOLO SHOW - 2ND PART
Opening on 29 October 2026
Artist Talk with Casper Faassen
ReCollection forms the second chapter of Bildhalle’s two-part presentation of Casper Faassen. The longstanding project grew out of the artist’s profound interest in collecting, memory and the value we assign to objects, and has since developed into a critical engagement with provenance, restitution and colonial legacy.
Faassen’s fascination with collecting reaches back to childhood, when gathering objects became a way of preserving moments of connection and understanding what made them valuable to him. Through a process he calls “ReCollecting”, he now traces dispersed cultural objects and reimagines them through his distinctive visual language, examining how Western museum collections have been formed and how cultural authority has been historically constructed.
While Faassen’s own Dutch colonial heritage informs the project, the exhibition at Bildhalle broadens its perspective to consider Switzerland’s place within histories of collecting, ownership and restitution. Works connected to Swiss institutions, collections and freeports trace histories ranging from paintings looted from Jewish families during the Second World War and a stolen Modigliani concealed in a Geneva freeport to smuggled antiquities and the Parthenon Marbles.
Through Faassen’s characteristic layering, the objects acquire an almost tangible presence, their contours rendered slightly indistinct. They seem simultaneously present and inaccessible; tantalisingly out of reach. Presented in crates that evoke the transport and trade of cultural goods, the resulting works become sculptural “memories in transit”, grouped according to shared histories of displacement, contested ownership or restitution.
For Faassen, restitution is not the conclusion of an object’s history, but the beginning of a broader conversation about historical injustice and contemporary inequality. Each ReCollected object occupies its own place within this ongoing dialogue, while others shaped by artistic admiration and centuries of exchange remind us that cultural interconnectedness long predates the borders we have since imposed.
