In the first room, you already encountered various curtains, two ceramic objects, and furniture. Here in the second room, the multidisciplinary nature of Hefti's work becomes even more apparent. Carpets, ceramic works, video performances, and a hand-painted mural come together to form a multi-layered overall picture. The individual works do not stand in isolation from one another but actively interact with each other.

Christoph Hefti's various video and performance works clearly demonstrate his interest in staged narrative forms and his performative way of thinking. On the right-hand wall with the mural, you can see a short video—Mud Song—featuring Hefti at the piano. The starting point for this piece was a residency in Potsdam. A nearby forest, with its dense vegetation and muddy landscape, inspired him to write a song—precisely the Mud Song. In the performance, he combines natural phenomena with festival costumes from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, alongside found objects. By doing so, he creates a unique, poetic visual world. In general, Hefti's performance and video works serve as an experimental space where reality and fiction frequently blur into one another.

Ceramics also hold an important place in Hefti's work. On the left wall, next to the Swissmask carpet, you can see two mask-like lamps. This is a series of faces that addresses the fleeting nature of encounters and potential acquaintances. Hefti has worked with clay since childhood, and it has become a natural extension of his creative practice. Unlike his carpets, which he designs but does not manufacture himself, the ceramics are created entirely by his own hands. He designs functional objects, such as lamps or stools, that take up the same motifs or thematic worlds as his textiles. This allows them to merge into a harmonious spatial ensemble.

Please head on over to the circle in the middle of the room.

In front of and inside the circle, you will find works by his experimental band, Taxi Val Mentek, which Hefti founded in 1983 together with his childhood friend Dominik Scherrer. Even while working in the fashion world, he pursued these independent, interdisciplinary projects in parallel. Taxi Val Mentek combined music, performance, costumes, set design, and video work to create surreal, often humorous productions. The elaborate, collage-like animations, flickering videos, and costumes added a fantastical visual dimension to the performances.

We now take you into the final room, past the abstract works and back into nature, to large carpet trees and textile living spaces. Hefti consistently designs his carpets for the floor; for him, their use and how they fit into daily life are central considerations right from the outset of the design process. When sketching, he thinks about his customers' everyday lives and what it’s like to live with the carpets: the furniture placed on them, the people or pets sitting on them, and the traces left by daily life. The soft textures and varied materials invite you to sit down on them or curl up inside them. Some carpets—like the brown-grey, fluffy, and shaggy one—Rug Life can be rolled up and explicitly used as seating or as armrests. In this way, they become formable pieces of furniture. According to Hefti, the carpets only realize their full potential through interaction with them.

In summary, Hefti deliberately breaks down conventional categories of design and art. Whether a design evolves into an expansive wall-to-wall curtain or a face made of clay turns into a mask-shaped lamp—Hefti uses the freedom of art to charge functional design objects with narrative depth. As his Instagram profile states: "Designer or Artist? You decide."

Short guided tour through the exhibition