For the first encounter with the new museum building, the Kunsthaus Zürich has invited the artist and choreographer William Forsythe (b. 1949) to produce a new work. ‘The Sense of Things’ can be experienced exclusively for four weeks in the museum’s new building by architect David Chipperfield. It is the first artistic intervention in the new space. Curated by Mirjam Varadinis, ‘The Sense of Things’ encourages the visitor to build a direct relationship with the architecture that will house some of Kunsthaus Zürich’s most vibrant and significant collections.

In Forsythe’s acoustic intervention, deconsecrated church bells of different sizes, pitches, and timbres will be activated in a contrapuntal composition that is widely distributed across the spaces of the new extension. In considering Chipperfield’s building as an immense sounding-body, Forsythe proposes that visitors individually tune the composition via their perambulations through the new museum, thereby embodying his choreographic proposition.