Surrealist Salon - Fever Dream at Dolder Waldhaus
By Olena Iegorova
Installation view of Surrealist Salon – Fever Dream, 2025, curated by Olena Iegorova x FOMO Art Space. Psychopomp (2025) by Tim Hergersberg. Performers Nika Timashkova, Rebeka Mondovics, Olena Iegorova.
Zurich Art Weekend 2025 brought a whirlwind of innovation, experimentation, and provocation to the city’s creative core, and Surrealist Salon – Fever Dream was there to match this energy with its raw hallucinatory intensity. Held over two days, June 13 - 14, the salon unfolded like a lucid dream — seductive, uncanny, and utterly immersive. Curated as both a homage and a reinvention of surrealism’s historical roots, the show drew together a constellation of contemporary artists, performers, and thinkers.
Born from the wreckage of war and the collapse of certainty, Surrealism emerged in the early 20th century as a movement shaped by crisis: by the psychic scars of world war, by the anarchic energy of Dada, and by Freud’s revelations of the unconscious mind. A century later, when the world finds itself in another fever dream and we are faced with a crisis of perception, Surrealism offers a refuge again.
The Surrealist Salon exhibition functioned less like a traditional gallery show and more like an ongoing séance — a fluid, living environment in which the border between viewer and art continually dissolved. It was the kind of collective dreaming André Breton might have recognized: irrational, sensual, and defiantly outside the bounds of logic.
From the outside, almost nothing hinted at the transformation taking place inside the historic Bar at Dolder Waldhaus. A once vibrant social space, dormant for years, was now revived for a single weekend.
Installation view of Surrealist Salon – Fever Dream, 2025, curated by Olena Iegorova x FOMO Art Space. Psychopomp (2025) by Tim Hergersberg. Photo by Urs Westermann
The first to greet you was Leandra Agazzi’s luminous art piece. With its glowing presence at the entrance, it lured you in with the quiet magnetism of flame to a moth. It wasn’t just light, it was a signal, a lighthouse. Next to it, a painting by Natalie Diserens formed a visual horizon line, bridging this radiance with the threshold of darkness beyond. This painting acted almost like a prologue, preparing the mind for what lay ahead.
As you moved into the corridor, you entered the portal. Tim Hergersberg’s sculptural intervention twisted the architecture of the space. The cold light cast over sculpted faces in the vitrine added a chilling eeriness. That stillness felt almost watchful. Just ahead, his creature loomed in silence, an ambiguous guardian between worlds. You had now crossed the threshold. The dream had begun.
Here, Uta Bekaia’s film was flickering softly in a side alcove, with its colors lush and its forms dissolving behind the veil in a trance-like rhythm. Rooted in a childhood memory shaped by war, it evokes a park once filled with swans — beautiful, and to a little child, menacing creatures that vanished as explosions became a “norm”. Their absence stood as a metaphor to the collapse of the world around them. The piece, suspended between nostalgia and loss, entered a wordless conversation with Yoan Masao’s soundscape — a haunting guide through this liminal passage. Built around the final, unanswered call of the extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird recorded in Hawaii decades ago, his three-channel soundscape was a meditation on extinction, beauty and unease, and the ache of what has been lost.
Further down, Alina Kopytsia’s mermen figures slithered through the space, like mystical guardians who replaced the myth of mermaids with something more enigmatic, unsettling, and challenging traditional notions. The textures shifted as you encountered Tetiana Kartasheva’s soft-yet-spiky installation, another take on alternative perspectives in a form of thought-provoking tactile contradiction. A pillow that might hurt you. Comfort that might not be safe. Nothing being what it seems like.
Installation view of Surrealist Salon – Fever Dream, 2025, curated by Olena Iegorova x FOMO Art Space. Disco Ball, (2024) by Sandro Steudler. Photo by Tetiana Kartasheva
Fabio Melone’s textile works stood like silent sentinels, marking milestones that quietly guided your passage through this space toward the vibrant bar. Each piece felt like a clue, or perhaps a warning. A figure, whether a man or a discoball, dared you to step further. Sandro Steudler’s projected form was rotating slowly in fractured light, its heavy breathing heightening the suspense with each inhale and step.
In the end, the tunnel gave way to a softened glow: the only zone carpeted in the original fabric of the Waldhaus. This marked the transition to Linda Hauser’s dream world — a true example of site-specificity. Playing with the interior of the decaying former hotel, her artworks spoke to one another in a chorus of fantasy pinks and surreal playfulness. The space became an immersive playground of subconscious delights, a much-needed pause before the buzz of the bar just beyond, a soft shift from quiet fantasy to raw energy pulsating behind the closed door.
And then — the Bar.
Installation view of Surrealist Salon – Fever Dream, 2025, curated by Olena Iegorova x FOMO Art Space. Performers - Nika Timashkova and Rebeka Mondovics. Works by Nic Hess
No longer just a mere functional space, but a living installation. On the glass, a vibrant layered window collage by Nic Hess transformed the space into something beyond the ordinary. Sunlight, striking the colors of the artwork, spilled into the bar and colored it from within. On the walls, Andreas Weber’s paintings hovered like half-remembered dreams, while Rocco A. De Filippo’s sculptures grounded the space with mysterious gravity. The design art by Basalto Collective, ceramic artworks by Reto and Markus Huber, along with works from Anna Riess and Anita Mucolli, mingled with each other, creating a total atmosphere of surreal conviviality. Their dreamlike forms gave the impression of precious artifacts from civilizations that only existed in parallel universes. Hergersberg’s altar piece and Nathalie Diserens’ curtain-like textile artwork, like a membrane between one reality and the next, deepened the sensation of stepping into an alternative world.
And the scene came alive.
Performers drifted through the space in surreal garments: Nika Timashkova and Rebeka Mondovics brought the dream to life with movement, presence, and improvisation. Michaël Reinhold invited guests to interact, blurring the lines between performer and audience. Wearing masks, playing games, sipping custom-created cocktails, and simply being — guests were not spectators, but integral parts of the fever dream itself.
It wasn’t just an art show. It was an atmosphere. A hallucination. A stage. A ritual.
And like all dreams, it passed — leaving behind echoes, afterimages, and the uncanny sense that something important had happened. Something otherworldly. Something (sur)real.
About The Author
Olena Iegorova (UA/CH) is an independent curator, art mediator and founder of [site specific] platform. Olena holds a master's degree in Romano-Germanic philology and an advanced degree in Curating from ZHdK. Her curatorial approach centers on diverse formats for audience engagement and participatory initiatives, exploring the intersection of art, education, digital culture, and social sciences. She has led numerous large-scale projects, including overseeing the public program of Zurich Art Weekend 23, curating international collaborations like Performing Kyiv hosted by Cabaret Voltaire, Schauspielhaus Zurich and Löwenbräukunst, mediating for Luma Foundation, and contributing to art publications like Reading Rämistrasse by Kunsthalle Zurich.