Hans Ulrich Obrist

One experience in particular left a deep impression on me during childhood, and I would say it was the work of Emma Kunz. I have always been profoundly transformed by her art. I did not grow up in a Swiss household where art played any significant role. Yet art entered our home thanks to Emma Kunz, because when I was a child, my mother often bought a product called AION A—a remedy that Emma Kunz herself discovered. It is a powder derived from a rock also named AION A, whose healing properties Kunz identified. In many Swiss pharmacies, this product was sold in packaging featuring one of her drawings. It was through AION A that art first entered our house.

She produced around four hundred drawings over the course of her life, each one possessing an extraordinary intensity. Her works on paper are executed in pencil as well as colored pencils. They are very large-format pieces. She also worked with oil pastels, of which she created about thirty.

Yes, there is a connection between spirituality and abstraction in her work. But it goes far beyond that. In reality, her drawings possess a multidimensional quality. One perceives all these dimensions at once. Emma Kunz herself compared her drawings to holograms. She created them with the aid of a pendulum; it was a ritual.

The German-Korean philosopher and writer Byung-Chul Han, who lives in Berlin, has written a book precisely on this idea: we live in an age of communication, yet one often marked by the disappearance of rituals. I believe this is very important. As Tarkovsky said, “We must revisit and reinvent rituals for the twenty-first century.” I think Emma Kunz can help us do exactly that—along with her entire body of work.

She would work for hours on end, often without sleeping. She believed that the intensity of this process could have an impact on the course of history. One day during the Second World War, she created a drawing with the hope that working with such great intensity might bring about Hitler’s disappearance. She truly believed in this. Using her pendulum, she drew with such force that she would not sleep until the work was complete.

Yes, Emma also saw herself as a scientist. I believe the physicist C.P. Snow, in a sense, highlighted this divide between the humanities and the sciences: the arts on one side, science on the other. He argued that we needed a bridge to overcome this dichotomy. We should not remain trapped in this binary thinking, but instead create a third space of encounter.

From my childhood onward, I have been fascinated by her work, and Emma Kunz has, in a sense, accompanied my entire life as a curator and museum director. It was also the subject of my first institutional exhibition, which I organized in 1992. I was invited as guest curator by the Centre Culturel Suisse on rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Paris. Together with Bice Curiger, we mounted an exhibition that explored Emma Kunz’s influence on contemporary art and on today’s artists—from Alighiero Boetti to Bethan Huws, by way of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré.

Then, once again at the Serpentine in 2006, I went to London and, in that park, we organized a major retrospective of Emma Kunz. The exhibition was realized in collaboration with the artist Christodoulos Panayiotou, who designed the furniture. Instead of sitting on ordinary chairs as we do now, visitors sat on chairs made of stone—crafted from that very rock. One can imagine a deeply holistic, all-encompassing experience: we were literally immersed in AION A!

I believe that today’s renewed interest in figures such as Hildegard of Bingen—one of the greatest composers of the Middle Ages, as well as an extraordinary writer, healer, and nun—is highly relevant in this context. A whole new generation is also rediscovering works like those of Emma Kunz.