Swiss artist Roman Signer is known for his pioneering artworks featuring everyday objects — balloons, buckets, stools and umbrellas. He orchestrates events, creating ephemeral sculptures and actions that blend humor, poetry and curiosity.
Running at the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum on the Bund from Oct 31 to Jan 3, 2027, the Roman Signer: Video & Films 1975–1989 and Now exhibition brings together 205 films made between 1975 and 1989, alongside Blue Ball, created for the 2012 Shanghai Biennale. Together, they trace Signer's distinctive practice at the intersection of installation, performance and the moving image.
Rather than making static objects, Signer treats time as a fourth dimension — hence the term "time sculpture". Balloons, buckets, stools and umbrellas are his materials; gravity, wind and water, his collaborators. Shot largely outdoors and often without an audience, and frequently recorded with the help of his family, these Super 8 films freeze fleeting acts of rising, falling, floating and dissolving into sculptures of time.
Born in Appenzell in 1938, Signer studied at design schools in Zurich and Lucerne before entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1971. He was galvanized by the landmark 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form.
Staged as an archive of the moving image, the exhibition deploys 100 micro-projectors across the galleries according to the artist's own vision, turning the space into a shifting grid of light.
"His work shows us that creativity isn't about one big masterpiece but about something that can spring up anytime, anywhere," said curator Li Zhenhua. "Signer believes creativity never runs out — it is always ready to be put into action."
At the opening-day talk, Li added: "For understanding how a global art history is contextualized — and how the threads of Chinese media, action and experimental art are read — Roman Signer is an artist who cannot be overlooked." Beyond art-historical lineage, he hopes visitors discover the artist's intuition and the beauty of the "ordinary" in daily life.
