In 2016 Switzerland slipped to second place in the ‘World Happiness’ ranks. On the surface a land of perfection, happiness and harmony, it is also a territory of contradictions. Proud of its rusticity – embodied in images of chalets, cowbells and other mountainous clichés – it promotes excellence in technology, sports and the Arts. Delving under this veneer, Pro Helvetia (The Swiss Arts Council) supported a three-day whistle-stop tour to ‘discover’ its institutions in Geneva, Lausanne, Basel and Zurich.

At first glance, each organisation was well supported, often housed in renowned architectural settings. There was a refreshing amount of curatorial freedom, fine publishing, and talented design helping to promote each venue’s interpretative and promotional materials. Yet a familiar story evolved: local feeling towards the arts was conservative, and Switzerland may be starting to feel the pressures, experienced elsewhere in Europe, to justify the support to the arts.

Lausanne, is perhaps the most emergent scene of the four cities visited. Its Fine Arts museum (MCBA) is currently housed in the large civic museum pole, which also includes a zoological museum. Alongside the Museum of Outsider Art (Collection de l’art brut) and its design museum, MUDAC, Lausanne also boasts a photography museum, the Musée de l’Elysée.

The Musée de l’Elysée bears the weight of local history – it has a rich holding of historic material and donations by pioneer photographers such as Paul Vionnet and Jean Mohr. Its collection is also spearheading the development of new conservation and 3D digitising techniques. Its new director Tatyana Franck seems, however, to be steering the institution away from its historic origins to mark its relevance in the contemporary art scene. Her collections-based exhibition, The Memory of the Future, seeks to draw parallels between the museum’s rich holdings of early techniques and contemporary artists. Pierre Wetzel’s portraits of performers taken at local music festivals in Merignac, France, are placed in dialogue with Matthew Brady’s poignant portraits of young American Civil War soldiers. However, neither photographer seems to benefit from the juxtaposition; both are reduced to a somewhat displaced, technical comparison.

More interesting is the juxtapostion between Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes of botanical studies (1840s) and Christian Marclay’s imprints of reels of audiocassette tape that highlight its obsolescence. While an installation by Lois Gréaud uses an alternative camera obscura to record the ‘soul’ of the museum.

I look forward to seeing how Franck might bring more radical approaches to the different layers of heritage at stake at the Musée de l’Elysée – perhaps when the museum relocates to its new venue in 2020. Certainly, the Musée de l’Elysée needs to position itself in relation to its neighbouring institutions and concomitant events on lake Geneva. For example, Vevey holds the citywide photography event, Festival Images. Lausanne’s world-class University of Art and Design (ÉCAL) is, without doubt, a great factor in the region’s fertile lens-based scene. In Geneva, the Centre de la Photographie provides a more experimental programme that considers the relationship between still and moving-image, and the wider arts scene. The city’s Contemporary Arts Centre organises a biennial moving-image festival of increasing international reach. More refreshing approaches, perhaps, include independent spaces in Lausanne, such as Circuit as well as the alternative scene alongside Zurich’s Manifesta 11.

In Basel we were confronted with a different picture. The Kunstmuseum bears the traces of the success of Art Basel in its ensuing support of the local art scene. The more experimental pole of the museum – the Gegenwart revisits performances from the Swiss artist Christian Philipp Müller to Joseph Beuys. The museum, in fact, had the audacity to present Beuys’ renowned performance pieces, such as I like America, and America likes Me (1974), alongside artefacts from Müller’s performances. While a shock to Beuys scholars who hold the items as autonomous and somewhat sacred, I found the incorporation of video works through the exhibition spaces offered a more immediate experience to an audience unfamiliar with the canon of German-speaking art history. It is also interesting to compare the experimental programme at the Gegenwart with the recently renovated branch of the Kunstmuseum, whose conservative ‘re-hang’ includes only a handful of women artists.

There are contradictions in and out of the institutions in both the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland; the pressure of looking to the future while some audiences hold on to the past can be sensed from the programmes of both the Musée de l’Elysée and Kunstmuseum, Basel. Localism and globalism are evidently at play in the linguistic and cultural division of the country, and I would not be surprised if these contradictory tendencies increase if – and when – funding pressures deepen.