Exhibitions

An arts district, a square before the city railway station… Plateforme 10 has been built on the site of a former Swiss railroad workshop and yard. It lies at the heart of the historic transformation of Lausanne’s main station. For the inauguration of this new neighborhood, the 3 museums making up Plateforme 10 – MCBA, mudac, and Photo Elysée – have decided to pay homage to the site’s railroading past with 3 exceptional shows organized around the common theme laid out by the overall title, TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN. Simply “train” in Switzerland’s four official languages, the title suggests a whole program that clearly reflects Switzerland’s collective imagination.

TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN

An arts district, a square before the city railway station… Plateforme 10 has been built on the site of a former Swiss railroad workshop and yard. It lies at the heart of the historic transformation of Lausanne’s main station. For the inauguration of this new neighborhood, the 3 museums making up Plateforme 10 – MCBA, mudac, and Photo Elysée – have decided to pay homage to the site’s railroading past with 3 exceptional shows organized around the common theme laid out by the overall title, TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN. Simply “train” in Switzerland’s four official languages, the title suggests a whole program that clearly reflects Switzerland’s collective imagination.

Admissions and tickets

1 theme, 3 exhibitions

Alluding to railroad imagery and the important role it has played throughout the history of art and art making since the Industrial Revolution, the exhibition TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN is the result of an intense cross-disciplinary collaboration of the 3 museums of Plateforme 10.

The show brings together and sets in dialogue a number of masterpieces and great classics by a range of artists, from Hopper to de Chirico, and includes pieces from all the fields of contemporary creativity, from design and photography to advertising. The three individual shows making up TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN are a stunning piece of work and the very heart of the arts district and its inaugural program.

MCBA

TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN
Voyages imaginaires

Voyages imaginaires (Imaginary Journeys) boasts over 60 masterpieces by a range of artists, from Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper to Paul Delvaux and Leonor Fini. The show invites visitors to discover how the image of the railroad train, that symbol of the Industrial Revolution par excellence, came to crystallize fascinating and essential reflections on artistic representation of a world that seemed to have been suddenly swept up in an acceleration without limits.


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mudac

TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN
Let’s meet at the station

Alluding to railroad imagery and the important role it has played throughout the history of art and art making since the Industrial Revolution, the exhibition TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN is the result of an intense cross-disciplinary collaboration of the 3 museums of Plateforme 10. The show brings together and sets in dialogue a number of masterpieces and great classics by a range of artists, from Hopper to de Chirico, and includes pieces from all the fields of contemporary creativity, from design and photography to advertising. The three individual shows making up TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN are a stunning piece of work and the very heart of the arts district and its inaugural program.

 

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Photo Elysée

TRAIN ZUG TRENO TREN
Crossing lines

Destins croisés (Crossing Lines) interweaves the visions, dreamlands, and spirit of conquest that have accompanied railroading from the outset. Learning to use and understand trains, the kinds of sociability that are specific to stations and railcars, the faces of railroad workers, the alternative practices of today – Destins croisés, a show teeming with discoveries to be made, aims to develop new approaches to the world of railroads.


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Exhibitions

Jean Tschumi Designer

27.02 – 31.05.2026

The mudac is inaugurating its new exhibition space, Le carré, with Jean Tschumi Designer. This exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Artistic Commission of Vaudoise Assurances, focuses on a particular aspect of the great Swiss architect’s work: his furniture designs for Le Cèdre, the headquarters of Vaudoise Assurances in Lausanne.

French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection

13.03 – 16.08.2026

Mounted in the MCBA Espace Focus gallery and within The collection, the display of the museum’s permanent collection, the show French Painting 1800-1945. Anatomy of a Collection invites visitors to rediscover the many masterpieces of French painting conserved in the museum. These are pieces signed by a number of major French artists, including Corot, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard. It is also the chance to discover paintings that are rarely on view.

Ella Maillart

06.03 – 01.11.2026

Adventurer, photographer and writer Ella Maillart (1903–1997) traversed Asia several times in the 20th century. In 2025, her entire body of work was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in recognition of its importance. Photo Elysée, which has held her photographic archives – consisting of thousands of images – since 1988, pays tribute to Maillart with this exhibition.

Focusing on Maillart’s four major journeys to Asia in the 1930s, the exhibition sets her images in dialogue with her writings and shows how her work serves as a record of a pivotal time in global history.

Luc Delahaye

06.03 – 31.05.2026

Luc Delahaye (b. 1962), is part of a generation of photographers who re-examined the relationship between documentary and artistic practice.

Delahaye has sought to confront the dislocations of the modern world. Through his mostly large-scale color works – documenting conflicts in Haiti, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, as well as OPEC and COP conferences – he examines the turbulent world we inhabit and the forums that are supposed to bring order to chaos.

Whether captured in a single shot or assembled from fragments on a computer over several months, his photographs always bring us face to face with reality, experienced either immediately or after the fact. As Delahaye explains, he seeks to articulate this reality from a purely documentary stance, without demonstration – “to achieve unity with reality through a form of absence, a form of unconsciousness, even. A silent unity. Photography is something quite beautiful: it allows us to reconnect the self with the world.”

Spanning a quarter-century of photographic output, this retrospective brings together around 40 large-format works – some specially produced for the exhibition and shown for the first time – alongside a major installation that marks a departure from Delahaye’s previous practice.

The Collection

Permanent presentation

« Come and see here what you won’t see elsewhere! » is the slogan for the permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors to showcase treasures from Vaud’s art collections, with some three hundred works dating from the eighteenth century to the present day.

 

Marina Xenofontos. Play Life

06.02 – 02.08.2026

Through her sculptures, found objects, writing and films, Marina Xenofontos interrogates the material manifestations of memory and history. For her show in the Espace Projet, she explores the question of space, both virtual and real.