AARAU — Six days before opening, Artificial Creativity Aargauer Kunsthaus is the cleanest Swiss search phrase for AI art this autumn. The exhibition runs 26 September 2026 to 10 January 2027 at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, in cooperation with HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel — fourteen artists staging how generative systems rewrite process, authorship and the feel of a museum room.
Curator Dr Katharina Ammann (museum director) works with assistant curator Florian Brand. A July 2026 press release frames the show around a post-ChatGPT public that already treats AI as everyday infrastructure: the question is not whether machines enter art, but what creativity means when they help make images, texts and decisions.
Control, authorship and hallucinations
Organisers describe the artistic process with AI as a dance between control and loss of control. Three guiding questions structure the hang: How does AI enter artistic processes? How does AI-generated content change perception of reality? What shifts when AI becomes spatial, physical and social?
Hallucinations — outputs that look credible without a factual base — are treated as errors *and* as productive disruptions. Authorship is shown as collaboration among people, datasets, prompts, rules and interfaces rather than a simple handoff from human to machine. Responsibility, the press text stresses, stays with people and institutions that develop, exhibit and evaluate the systems; AI itself has no intentions.
Fourteen artists in the rooms
Participating artists: Alfatih, Niculin Barandun, Botto, Terence Broad, Onome Ekeh, Emanuel Gollob, Tobias Gutmann, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Hochschuh & Donovan, Esther Hunziker, Simone C Niquille, Theresa Reiwer, Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg, and Robi Voigt.
Works span interactive robots, VR and real-time video, NFT image systems, portrait booths with chatbot partners, and installations that make training environments visible. A learning space inside the exhibition offers two chatbots for visitors to test utopian and dystopian stances on AI; a test lab in the ground-floor Freiraum lets the public try image-generating tools and feel technical unpredictability first-hand.
Practical details for visitors and press
Media preview: Thursday 24 September 2026 at 11:00, with Ammann and Brand. Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10:00–17:00, Thursday 10:00–20:00, closed Mondays. An accompanying programme of talks, workshops and panels addresses ethical, legal and aesthetic questions; a publication will include texts by computer scientist Dr Eva Cetinić (University of Zurich) and philosopher Dr Julia Langkau (University of Geneva), plus artist responses.
Why Aarau matters for AI art search
For queries such as “AI art exhibition Aarau 2026,” “Artificial Creativity HEK” or “Aargauer Kunsthaus AI,” the dates, partner and artist list are now public. Primary sources: the Aargauer Kunsthaus exhibition page and the July 2026 English press PDF. The show’s wager is museum-scale: make the conditions of machine creativity visible — and keep human responsibility in the room.
HEK partnership and Swiss art context
Aargauer Kunsthaus positions itself as a leading museum for Swiss art; HEK in Basel has, since 2011, hosted critical work on digital culture and media technologies. Their collaboration here is not a tech demo but a museum argument: AI as another media shift in a line that runs from photography to digitisation — initially met with apprehension, later absorbed into new forms. Acknowledgements in the press pack cite the Canton of Aargau, Aargauischer Kunstverein, Swisslos Fund, City of Aarau and the Federal Office of Culture, alongside HEK director Sabine Himmelsbach’s advisory role.
For schools and general audiences, the accompanying talks and Freiraum test lab matter as much as the finished installations: they turn Artificial Creativity from a viewing experience into a place to form a stance. Anyone searching the exhibition title or “AI art exhibition Aarau 2026” now has opening hours, preview day, artist roster and partner museum before the 26 September public start — the first-mover window for culture and technology coverage ahead of the winter run through 10 January 2027.