Between White Walls…
20 YEARS OF PEAC MUSEUM – AN EXHIBITION IN TWO ACTS.
The PEAC Museum.
Paul Edge Art Collection.
February 18–July 21, 2024
This exhibition, conceived to reflect on two decades of collecting and exhibiting, is inherently self-reflexive—it asks what museums do, how they organize thought, and how objects are framed as art. In this context, Butail’s work becomes more than an artwork on view—it becomes a meta-object: a meditation on structure itself, on the architecture of thought, tradition, and visual language.
Her art, often grounded in oral traditions, sacred geometry, and modular spatial systems, resists simple categorization. At PEAC, where the white cube is being both inhabited and interrogated, Butail’s interventions act as quiet but potent counterpoints. Her work does not demand the white wall—it questions it, asking how memory survives architecture, how ritual survives repetition, how silence carries story.
Further, PEAC’s emphasis on intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogues creates a fertile site for Butail’s practice to be read not just as a formal or conceptual abstraction, but as a global articulation of embodied knowledge systems. Her presence in this context affirms that contemporary art’s future lies not in erasing traditions, but in reweaving them—attentively, poetically, and with acute spatial intelligence.
To situate Butail’s work among the museum’s long-held European minimalism and conceptualism is to invite resonance, not contrast. Her practice, while emerging from Indian epistemologies, speaks fluently to the global language of quietude, reduction, and relational form. This is what makes her inclusion not only timely—but necessary
Between white walls… featured around 60 works from the collection. The exhibition draws associative, thematic and art-historical links between the works, thus widening the focus from just the collection itself to exhibition practices as a whole. What changes when works of art are presented together? What stories are constructed, what connections or contradictions emerge, and how does this space between the white walls function?
Artists in the exhibition include: Paul Ahl, Marc Angeli, Frank Badur, Joachim Bandau, Stephan Baumkötter, Tom Benson, Reto Boller, Astha Butail, Max Cole, Rudolf de Crignis, Rolf-Gunter Dienst, Joseph Egan, Henrik Eiben, Paul Fägerskiöld, Rupprecht Geiger, Florian Haas, Marcia Hafif, Katharina Hinsberg, Günther Holder, Gottfried Honegger, Alfonso Hüppi, Ben Hübsch, Sophie Innmann, Donald Judd, Judith Kakon, Dieter Kiessling, Martina Klein, Imi Knoebel, Brigitte Kowanz, Zora Kreuzer, Russel Maltz, Joseph Marioni, Annette Merkenthaler, Michael Mathias Prechtel, David Rabinowitch, Franziska Reinbothe, Michael Reisch, Winston Roeth, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Antonio Scaccabarozzi, Adrian Schiess, Astrid Schindler, Anna Schütten, Paul Schwer, David Semper, Phil Sims, Anne Sterzbach, Maria Tachmann, Michael Toenges, Peter Tollens, Günter Umberg, Michael Venezia