To mark its 40th anniversary, Swiss Institute revisits Regift, the landmark 2009 exhibition originally organized at SI in New York by John Miller with Piper Marshall. Co-produced by Swiss Institute and Luma Foundation, the anniversary edition is presented at Luma Westbau, bringing together original participants alongside an expanded selection of artists whose practices engage with questions of generosity, exchange, and value in contemporary contexts, with over 50 artists across two floors reflecting four decades of SI’s program and international networks.
The original Regift exhibition examined systems of gift exchange and their relationship to economic structures, social reciprocity, and the ways in which gifts bind relations of mutual obligation. The exchange of gifts, though an ancient and widespread practice, remains an economic anomaly. Gift exchange resists a logic of pure equivalence. Like an artwork itself, a gift inhabits a space of incalculability: one shaped by unspoken obligations and reciprocities that are emotional, social, and hierarchical as much as material. Regift takes this premise as a point of departure, proposing that the artwork and the gift share a fundamental resistance to being fully accounted for within systems of measurable value.
In this new iteration, for SI’s 40th anniversary, Regift will broaden its scope to consider the rituals surrounding gift giving and the celebratory occasions that prompt such exchanges, from birthdays and anniversaries to communal and spiritual observances. The exhibition will also look beyond Western paradigms of exchange to consider global practices of giving, such as offerings made to ancestors, and acts of planting or dedicating gifts toward future generations. Through these expanded lenses, Regift will explore how gifts, both material and symbolic, mediate relationships across time, culture, and economy, while continuing to challenge the boundaries between generosity and obligation, value and meaning.