For its autumn 2026 cycle, the MBAL is delighted to present the exhibition For One Solid Time, Wet: The Swimming Pool in the Imagination. The exhibition explores the swimming pool as a significant motif within the history of contemporary art. It unites international artists who have explored the complexity of the pool, using it as a symbol of both prosperity and catastrophe, joy and solitude: a metaphor for our search for order and serenity in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.
The exhibition is co-curated by Federica Chiocchetti, former MBAL director, writer and curator based in Paris, and Lou Stoppard, writer and curator based in London.
This project stems from a rumour linked to the history of the MBAL. In the past, some politicians had proposed closing the museum to replace it with an indoor swimming pool. Fortunately for the artistic and cultural heritage of Le Locle, the canton of Neuchâtel and Switzerland at large, this project has not come to fruition; thus, the curatorial team decided to transform this threat into the theme of an exhibition. Within the exhibition, the swimming pool is considered as a political instrument or environment, bearing similarities to the museum or the art gallery: a space in which light, bodies and lines are controlled, where order prevails over disorder, and where certain boundaries govern behaviours, interactions and norms.
The selected works immerse visitors in the visual, symbolic and emotional world of the swimming pool. Far from being merely a recreational setting, the swimming pool becomes a space for aesthetic and social reflection, a mirror of our contemporary desires and anxieties. At once an architectural and sculptural object, a geometric space and a setting for physical experiences, the swimming pool embodies order, the control of nature, and also a form of collective dreaming linked to modernity, well-being and intimacy. It reveals itself as an ambivalent place, capable of evoking serenity as much as solitude, light as much as emptiness, luxury as much as ruin. Against a backdrop of climate crisis and dwindling resources, the exhibition also explores the paradoxes surrounding water management and inequalities in access to this vital resource. It offers a critical and poetic interpretation of the swimming pool as an icon of Western societies, whilst highlighting the alternative narratives it can convey: queer, political, or linked to memory and the passage of time.
The featured artists include Judith Albert, Nazgol Ansarinia, Rossella Biscotti, Andrew Cranston, Blaise Drummond, Ellie Epp, Elmgreen & Dragset, Kate Gottgens, Alexander Hahn, David Hockney, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Alain Jacquet, Hilary Lloyd, Jean-Luc Manz, Daina Mattis, Alexandra Maurer, Ian Mwesiga, Antonio Oba, Michael Raedecker, Anastasia Samoylova, Denis Savary, Leanne Shapton, Mary Stephenson, Larry Sultan, Elisabeth Tonnard, Levi van Veluw, Eva Vermandel, Bill Viola, Caroline Walker and Pipilotti Rist.
