Peter Fischli (*1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) have created sculptures, videos, site-specific installations, projections and photographs. Their broad conceptual and artistic œuvre engages with the world of everyday life. With wit, subtlety, gentle irony and modesty, they question the mechanisms of artistic authorship, the value-added cycles of the art world, the symbolic value of artworks and the role of the viewer. Peter Fischli has continued the duo’s work alone since the death of David Weiss. The Zurich-based artists have been associated with the gallery since 1983.

World Classroom
Group Exhibition
Mori Museum, Tokyo
April 19–September 24, 2023
Since the 1990s, when the development of contemporary art began to be considered from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world, we have been seeing that contemporary art today goes far beyond the framework of arts and crafts and fine art in the school classroom. It is a composite field with connections to all subjects, including language and literature, arithmetic, science, and social studies. In each of these disciplines, researchers are exploring the “unknowns” of the world, delving into history, and making new discoveries and inventions from the past to the future in order to enrich our perception of the world. The stance adopted by contemporary artists that seeks to go beyond our preconceptions in a creative way is also connected to this exploration of these unknowns. In this sense, the contemporary art museum is something akin to a “classroom of the world” where we can encounter and learn about these unknown worlds. World Classroom: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum, is an attempt for us to encounter a world we have never seen or known from a wide variety of perspectives, using the subjects we learn at school as a gateway to contemporary art. Even though this exhibition is divided into sections such as “Language and Literature,” “Social Studies,” “Philosophy,” “Arithmetic,” “Science,” “Music,” and “P. E.,” each work, in fact, crosses over multiple subjects and domains. While over half the exhibited works will be drawn from the Mori Art Museum Collection for the first time ever, there will also be newly-commissioned artworks for this exhibition – altogether creating a “classroom of the world,” place of learning with works by some 50 artists/artist groups.
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