“Please do magic, whatever that may mean for you right now.” The stage directions are simple and clear, but the performance itself is rather difficult and hard to work out. For more than thirty years, the artist Ingeborg Lüscher, who has lived in Ticino since 1967, has been inviting friends, neighbours, and colleagues to perform a “magic” act in front of her camera. Without any systematic intention, that has led to a collection of more than 500 contemporary self-presentations and long taken on the characteristics of an original and surprising portrait gallery.

The exhibition presents some 120 collected ‘sessions’ from three decades – from Paul Thek to Ai Weiwei, and from Andy Warhol to Annika Larsson. Concentrated, yet relaxed artist celebrities ‘doing magic’. This body of work is accompanied by The Heart on its Way to Becoming (1975), another conceptual work of encyclopedic dimensions by Ingeborg Lüscher.