Experience the impact of Banksy's activist street art at a grand exhibition in Saxon, Switzerland. This unique showcase revitalizes social messages through art, attracting thousands eager to engage with cultural activism.
After Paris, New York and Barcelona, Banksy’s work has come to French-speaking Switzerland for the first time, to the small town of Saxon in the lower Valais. Its opening month has reportedly attracted over 10,000 visitors.
Most of the originals among the 120 works have now disappeared, been removed, damaged or destroyed. To keep the artworks alive, the exhibition’s director, Parisian theatre producer Hazis Vardar, has carefully reproduced them in copies of their original surroundings, including 65 life-sized reconstituted works. It is the largest display of Banksy’s work except for New York’s. The exhibition was not formally approved by the artist but he has not rejected it, Hazis told French-Swiss television.
So you can see a stencilled Ukrainian girl acrobat showing off her balancing skills upside down on a pile of rubble,…
…a stencilled migrant child in Venice on a wall flowering with a carnival streamer from 2019,…
…and a reproduction of a hotel room with a pillowfighting Israeli soldier and Palestinian from the Banksy Walled Off (joke) hotel that Banksy helped establish in 2017 overlooking the West Bank. (The Hotel itself announced its closure “for the time being” following the 2023 Hamas-led led attack on Israel).
Hazis, a Belgian of Albanian parentage, also put together a book about the Banksy project (Musée Banksy, Albin Michel, €29.90) in November 2023, but in line with the artist’s noncommercial approach, it’s not being promoted at the exhibition. And a sticker on the cover supports the SOS Méditerannée campaign to help migrants seeing refuge from crises in Africa by fleeing across the sea. (It was revealed in August 2020, that Banksy had privately funded a rescue boat to save refugees at risk in the Mediterranean Sea.)
The book’s cover is Banksy’s famous stencil series Girl with a Balloon, voted most popular work of art with the public in the U.K. in 2017. A framed version went for $1 million at auction through Sotheby’s in 2018 before being partly shredded immediately afterwards to become Love is in the Bin — “the first work in history ever created in a live auction”.
Of course a version of the 2004 original is there, too, in Saxon, with its message “There is Always Hope”.
The centre is housed in what used to be the local casino, now turned into the Paris Saxon Centre d’Art. It has been revived by Hazis’s 54-year-old brother Alil, a Parisian-based actor, author and theatre producer.
So how did Banksy’s most ambitious project end up finding a home just off the main street in this town of 6,000 people after its success in Brussels, Barcelona and Kraków, as well as Paris and New York? Albanian is the third most common language (3.4% of the population) in Saxon according to the 2000 census but that seems not to have any relation.
Alil told Swiss television that he fell in love with the 1855 all-wood casino and its auditorium when seeing it by chance after he decided to establish himself in the region. “Beautiful enough to die for,” was his judgement.
Saxon’s website boasts of the casino’s frequentation by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. The casino, which has belonged to the local authority since 2008, has offered a croupier school, cabarets and shows, concerts, a discotheque and a restaurant at various times in an effort to keep it attractive to visitors.
Alil decided to relaunch social activities there.
In August 2024, the Paris Saxon Centre, with Alil as director, opened with theatre performances, and the packed sessions gave Alil confidence that there is an audience to sustain it.
Next to the casino is an exhibition hall, and Alil asked his brother to bring the Banksy display he had organized elsewhere to Saxon. He admitted to his television interviewer that it would normally take three years to set up but asked for “a gift that only a brother could give” to stage it almost immediately.
Hazis added that his own aim was to present the Banksy works in the context in which they were created. All the works are carefully annotated and give their original dates. Entry costs CHF15 for children aged 6 and up, CHF25 for adults, and CHF20 for over-60s. Children under 6 get in free. The exhibition runs until 22 March 2026 but it is worth checking at the site since it is only open every day on school holidays.
Wikipedia has a full article on Banksy, plus a list of his works and those that have been damaged or destroyed.
Banksy has said he was influenced early on by musician and artist 3D (Robert Del Naja, a founding member of the band Massive Attack). But others have said his work resembles the style of 73-year-old French graffiti artist Blek le Rat (Xavier Prou), “the father of stencil graffiti”.
A British newspaper identified Banksy in 2008 as Robin Gunningham, born just outside Bristol in 1974. University researchers claimed to have confirmed the identification in 2016, but this has not been admitted. In an interview five years earlier he was described as “white, 28, scruffy casual—jeans, T-shirt, a silver tooth, silver chain and silver earring”.
Hazis was asked in the television interview whether Banksy was going to visit the The World of Banksy. The artist did go to the New York and London shows, and he validated the first exhibition in Paris five years ago, acknowledging accurate copies as valid. As for Saxon, Hazis shrugged and said: “I don’t know.”
Diego Mendoza. Banksy fakes seized in Italy: Prosecutors said Monday that a 2023 probe led them to a group that specialized in Banksy forgeries, and experts who assisted with the operation said it was “the biggest act of protection of Banksy’s work”. Semafor, 11 November 2024 (LINK).
