Other Voices, Other Rooms

The new building for the City of Zurich Police's criminal investigation branch, completed in 2021, was a house of art before it became a house of the police. For Other Voices, Other Rooms, an extraordinary art-and-architecture project, curator Adam Szymczyk invited international artists to engage with the building's architecture and institutional context. The resulting works by Ross Birrell (Scotland, UK), Banu Cennetölu (Turkey), Zehra Döan (Kurdistan, Turkey), David Harding (Scotland, UK), Hiwa K (Germany, born in Kurdistan, Turkey), and Daniel Knorr (Germany, born in Romania) were on public display in the building in 2021, before the police moved in.Only David Harding's contribution has remained as a permanent and publicly accessible artwork, a text installation that is now embedded in the concrete floor outside the building's main entrance. However, the entire process of the project was documented by Zurich-based photographer Melanie Hofmann. A selection of her shots is also...