30% Dandelion

The dandelion—as a flower, botanical plant, cultural symbol, and aesthetic phenomenon—possesses strength and quiet courage. Unobtrusive yet persistent, it adapts radically, returns, and resists. Under the title 30% Dandelion, the exhibition at the Kunsthaus brings together more than 20 contemporary artistic positions dedicated to the flower and its direct connection to humans—humans share 30% of their genetic material with the flower. In the works, we encounter the melancholy of a crumbling present.

The dandelion—as a flower, botanical plant, cultural symbol, and aesthetic phenomenon—possesses strength and quiet courage. Unobtrusive yet persistent, it adapts radically, returns, and resists. Under the title 30% Dandelion, the exhibition at the Kunsthaus brings together more than 20 contemporary artistic positions dedicated to the flower and its direct connection to humans—humans share 30% of their genetic material with the flower. In the works, we encounter the melancholy of a crumbling present. At the same time, they take us on a journey into the familiar, beautiful, and intoxicating aesthetics of the flower and its exuberant expression of vitality. The focus is on recurring arrival, symbiotic cooperation, and farewell: poetic, political, and ecological.

The dandelion serves both as a model of adaptive strength and as a language spoken by all. In the spirit of floriography – the historical language of flowers – it becomes a transcultural gesture of recognition and communication: overlooked, but persistent and beautiful. As a flower of the margins, meadows and gardens, it offers a symbolic vocabulary that resists normative constraints, speaks in everyday languages, possesses healing powers and, in the radiant colour of the sun, entices the insects that fertilise it. The exhibition is based on the concept of ‘entanglements’ as well as on philosophical and ecological framework concepts of ‘aesthetic offering’ (Elaine Scarry) and ‘critical hybridity’ – and is also linked to the exhibition on the upper floor, Hybrid Pleasures. Helen Chadwick supported by Liesl Raff – in which the productive and provocative forms of a polyphonic hybridity become the subject. The ‘entanglements’ are, as formulated by thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Timothy Morton, just as politically and colonially charged as they are cross-genre, cross-gender and intrinsically seen. When Haraway writes, ‘We will be together or not at all,’ it is important to trace the connections and use the insights for a just future.

Amidst ecological crises, colonial aftermaths and digital acceleration, ‘30% Dandelion’ calls for new forms of attention – attuned to what grows slowly, demands time and returns quietly. The flower, but also the dandelion with its spreading seeds, its natural healing power and its communal flourishing, embodies this principle of an ethical way of life based on coexistence.

With works by Anita Fuchs, Spencer Finch, Barbara Frischmuth, Joiri Minaya, Nina Schuiki, Claudia Larcher, Jonas Mekas, Marwa Arsanios, Anna Ridler and others, the exhibition unfolds as a polyphonic exploration of the flower, its attribution and power of attraction.

The project is part of the collaborative project BLOOM, which will connect the locations of the Universalmuseum Joanneum from spring to winter 2026.