Outlaws
OPENING 15.10.2026
H18:00-20:00
OPENING 15.10.2026
H18:00-20:00
Outlaws
Louisa Gagliardi, Shamiran Istifan, Yoan Mudry, Gina Proenza, Cally Spooner, Jonas Staal, Doris Stauffer
The annual group exhibition of the Istituto Svizzero in Rome is titled Outlaws. The project takes the concept of law as its point of departure, questioning its nature as a human convention that appears immutable yet is often subject to historical shifts and internal tensions. The works examine what – and whom – the law governs, and who instead positions themselves above or outside it. These questions unfold across different historical periods and stories, often set in Switzerland. They also engage with the poetic, formal, and sometimes humorous dimensions of legal structures, exploring how rules and diplomacy can shape social realities and open new imaginative possibilities for understanding social justice and human coexistence.
The works operate across multiple registers, drawing on figures that have pushed beyond normalised rules and conventions, or groups who have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose new orders on reality. Toi et ta bande by Gina Proenza (Bogotá, 1994; lives in Lausanne) looks at medieval trials against insects that took place in the countryside around Lausanne as a lens to tackle the arbitrariness of legal procedure and the construction of the common enemy in times of crisis. Jonas Staal (Zwolle, 1981; lives between Bern, Rotterdam, and Athens) presents an overview of his long-term project New World Summit, through which he builds alternative parliaments for organisations excluded from existing legal and political frameworks. WHAT HAPPENED!? A conversation with my Mother by Cally Spooner (Ascot, 1983; lives in Turin) draws a connection between the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 on Lake Geneva and her mother’s past as an educator through the pedagogical concept of “benign neglect”. The singing moka pots by Yoan Mudry (Lausanne, 1990; lives in Geneva) reproduce an anarcho-punk song about work that emerged from the squatter movement in the 1990s, while the work of Doris Stauffer (Amden, 1934 – Zurich, 2017) bears witness to the height of artistic and feminist disobedience in 1970s Zurich through the deconstruction of the patriarchal order and the rehabilitation of the witch as a pedagogical figure operating outside the law. The lease is almost up by Shamiran Istifan (Baden, 1987; lives in Zurich) engages with the forms of separation between groups of people, repurposing a fourteenth-century altarpiece to give shape to the absences of institutional memory. Finally, the painting Swamped by Louisa Gagliardi (Sion, 1989; lives in Zurich) evokes a post-apocalyptic yet hopeful scenario in which human laws cease to make sense and nature reclaims the human landscape.
Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (Head Curator Istituto Svizzero)
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Istituto Svizzero
Via Ludovisi 48, Rome
Free entry, no registration required
Opening hours:
Wednesday/Friday: 14:30-18:30
Thursday: 14:30-20:00
Saturday/Sunday: 11:00-18:30
For press inquires, please contact press@istitutosvizzero.it
Cally Spooner (1983, Ascot) is a British-Italian artist and writer based in Turin. Her choreographies unfold across media, including sound, film, text, objects, and drawings.
Spooner has exhibited her work at numerous institutions, including Graham Foundation, Chicago; Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva. Her live productions, plays, and events have been presented, among others, at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; High Line, New York; Tate Britain; and Tate Modern, London.
Gina Proenza (1994, Bogotá) is a French-Colombian artist based in Lausanne. Her work engages with the use of words to question relations of power tied to language and its social construction. Woven from her Colombian and French heritage and her two mother tongues, both shaped by colonial histories, her practice unfolds through sculptures, installations, sound pieces, and videos. Proenza is active in independent art scenes. Since 2025, she has been part of the curatorial team at Tunnel Tunnel in Lausanne. She was co-director of Forde in Geneva from 2020 to 2023 and co-founded the artist-run space Pazioli in Lausanne in 2015.
She has exhibited her work at numerous institutions, including Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Musée Cantonal d’Art, Lausanne; Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds; KunstHalle Sankt-Gallen; Centre d’Art Neuchâtel; and Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris.
Louisa Gagliardi (1989, Sion) is a visual artist based in Zurich. Gagliardi’s pictorial compositions verge on realism while reimagining social scenes marked by alienation and incommunicability. She prints her digitally conceived images on PVC, intervening on the surface with gels, nail polish, glitter, and latex to create luminous, iridescent works that blur the boundaries between digital and physical objects.
She has exhibited her work at numerous venues, including MASI – Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna; Galerie Eva Presenhuber x TAXA, Seoul; and Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw.
Shamiran Istifan (1987, Baden) is a visual artist based in Zurich. Her practice combines sculpture, installation, textile, and image to explore symbolic structures, power relations, and the processes through which objects accumulate meaning.
Her work has been exhibited at various institutions across Zurich, Lausanne, London, Paris, Berlin, Basel, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Istifan received the Art Prize of the Canton of Zurich in 2021, the Swiss Art Award in 2025, and the Manor Kunstpreis in 2026.
Yoan Mudry (1990, Lausanne) is an artist based in Geneva. Working primarily through painting, alongside sculpture, installation, and performance, Mudry draws on advertisements, films, books, and images found online to explore how images produce and circulate meaning. Through processes of appropriation, translation, and displacement, he examines how ideologies take form in images, texts, and visual languages.
He has exhibited his work at institutions including the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Lentos Museum, Linz; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; and MCBA – Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, as well as at the Swiss Art Awards in Basel.
Doris Stauffer (1934, Amden–2017, Zurich) was, together with Serge Stauffer, Hansjörg Mattmüller, and Peter Jenny, among the founders of the F+F School of Experimental Design in 1971. In her artistic practice, teaching, and political activism, Stauffer became increasingly involved with feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, Doris Stauffer founded the women’s liberation movement FBB together with other women. In 1975, she presented for the first time the series Peniswärmer—a humorous examination of entrenched gender roles—and the more sardonic peep boxes Patriarchales Panoptikum in the exhibition Frauen sehen Frauen: eine gefühlvolle, gescheite, gefährliche Schau (Women See Women: A Sensitive, Clever, Dangerous Exhibition), initiated, among others, by Heidi Bucher, Bice Curiger, and Rosina Kuhn at the Strauhof in Zurich. In 1977, Stauffer held her first Witches course at the F+F. The course, open exclusively to women, addressed feminism and creativity, as well as sexist tendencies in art and society. In 1978, following tensions at the F+F related to her Witches course, Stauffer founded the Women’s Workshop, a continuation of the Witches course that she ran independently from the F+F, while continuing to teach at the school until 1981.
Jonas Staal (1981, Zwolle) is a visual artist based between Bern, Rotterdam, and Athens. His work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher, he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018–ongoing); with writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza, he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021–ongoing); and with Laure Prouvost, he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union (2019–ongoing).
His exhibition projects have been presented at venues including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Gwangju Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; and Serpentine Galleries, London.
His projects have been exhibited widely, including at venues such as Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; V&A, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; M HKA, Antwerp; Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz; and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, as well as at the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale, the 12th Taipei Biennale, and the 14th Shanghai Biennale.
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Louisa Gagliardi, Swamped, 2024