Ronit Porat / How Come A Butterfly Flies
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Sommer Salon Zurich is proud to present How Come a Butterfly Flies, Ronit Porat’s debut exhibition in Switzerland, on the occasion of Zurich Art Weekend.

The exhibition brings together works from different series and periods, reflecting her ongoing interest in images produced and shared in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, often by or about women.Porat draws on the cultural production of societies between the two World Wars, transforming it into the raw material of her work: artworks, advertisements, minor news stories, crime reports, fashion, scientific and technological developments, zoological research, psychoanalytic sketches, political imagery, and studies of sexuality.

Ronit Porat’s practice extends the legacy of photomontage rooted in Dada and Surrealism, drawing on archival images to unsettle meanings and realities. This lineage is particularly resonant in Untitled (2018), where she combines a photograph by Aenne Biermann with a portrait of Emmy Hennings – poet, performer, and central figure of early Dada, who co-founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916. Porat imaginatively inhabits the milieu of these women artists, entering their social and artistic orbit, and interlacing her own visual language with theirs.

Ronit Porat’s works revisit both historical events and personal archives, bringing forward marginal or overlooked narratives. She places viewers in front of enigmatic clues, inviting them to trace forgotten artists, elusive figures, and unresolved stories – or simply to experience the poetry and irony of her uncanny compositions.

Moving freely and gracefully between fragments of troubling social realities, Porat reactivates imageswith a renewed sense of tension that speaks to our present moment. How Come a Butterfly Flies evokes a sense of wonder intertwined with uncertainty, an attempt to approach what cannot be fully grasped or resolved. The images remain unsettled, histories porous, and the viewer is left to inhabit the space between what is seen and what cannot fully be known.