Simply a row of photographs, or pictures: starting from the left, a series of colours, from yellow down to white or from white up to yellow, depending on how you look at it, followed by two portraits of a man against a black background, first in profile and then turned slightly towards us as if seeking eye contact. Then comes a black-and-white image of a steppe-like landscape under a cloud-streaked sky, next to that a still-life with berries and fruits in and around a bowl and, finally, two carpets based on photographs of a young man and a sun-drenched southern landscape. The yellow on the left harmonises pleasingly with the pale green on the far right. In four of the pictures, the colours emerge out of a deep black; between them, like an incision, is a classic black-and-white photograph.
This small parade of vertical-format images was created by SHIRANA SHAHBAZI for this exhibition. The series as a whole appears ordered and simple, and this effect is underscored by the vertical format. It is almost as though the stringency of the arrangement is meant to conceal the fact that the images themselves are a volatile mix: colour fields alongside portraits alongside landscapes alongside still lifes alongside more portraits and landscapes. But what is it all about? Is it about landscapes or people or something else? The question is hardly new. In referring directly to the world around us, photography is so strongly fixated on its subject matter that we expect landscape to hang next to landscape, portrait next to portrait and still life next to still life. Yet here we have a motley jumble of colours and motifs, all thrown together. It makes us wonder whether Shirana Shahbazi is interested in the subject matter at all, or whether she is perhaps simply using it as a foil some for other other visual dialogue.
Shirana Shahbazi’s work touches upon many of the issues that inform photography today. On the one hand, her works address the question of the loss of the image. Portrait, landscape, cityscape, still life and colour field are among the genres that are the tools of her craft. They are composed, found, observed, captured, printed directly on to photo paper or enlarged by painters to the size of billboards, turned into wallpaper and pasted as repetitive patterns, used as a background, or woven into radiant visual carpets.
These carpets appeal to our love of images, but never serve the image for its own sake. Indeed, to do so would be idolatry, a false piety pandering to the contemporary visual world in all its glossiness, seduction and illusion, its usage and abusage of the images that are so freely available and either so detached from what is portrayed in them, or so inextricably linked with it, that our perception becomes confused. This is where Shirana Shahbazi’s scepticism sets in. She knows that representations and portrayals can falsify and prescribe, that images can signify manipulation and power. Here, the overweening love of images is subdued and the circumspection and questioning begins; here it becomes clear that the different forms of appearance that Shahbazi’s pictures take are all part and parcel of her hesitation, her doubt, and the resultant discursive visual strategy. The love of images should have free rein. It should not be constrained, exploited or misused. And yet, at the same time, images must harbour their own co-ordinates, have their own framework and their own conditions for understanding. Otherwise they run the risk of being misconstrued. From the warp and weft of pleasure and doubt, sensuality and reflection, Shirana Shahbazi weaves a tapestry strung between the immediacy inherent in photography and the freedom of the abstract image.
In the last ten or fifteen years, the old bastions of documentary photography and art photography have been well and truly demolished. In that time, art has moved ever closer to photography and photorealism. Abandoning the goals of utopian totality, it has turned instead to documenting and commenting on the world and its situation, exploring the world as a realm of signs, probing and appropriating perceptions in space and time, decontextualising the images found in the media. Understanding and grasping, rather than prescribing and designing, has become the key approach. Accordingly, photography and photographic thinking have expanded to experiment with every conceivable form. Long-established ways of seeing have begun to disintegrate, borders have blurred. The newfound interest in every form of photography—as reproduction, documentation, composition or mediafication—has rolled back the boundaries. Today, form and approach, or form and context, are no longer unassailable bastions or unquestioned dogma. Instead, free artistic works now make use of what were once strictly documentary forms, while compositionally staged and morphed photographs can sometimes exude a more potent sense of reality than documentary photos themselves. One good example of this is the work of Cristian Andersen.
Such freedom, however, also has its drawbacks. In the broad and all-encompassing context of the media, photography is seen as a visual shopping mall from which to pick and choose at will, discarding and customising as we see fit, until our eyes begin to pop. Scan them in, run them through Photoshop, post them on the Web—and the pictures rain down like manna from heaven, in one context or another, with or without an explanation of their origins, colour-enhanced to make them more yellow, or green or pink. Astonishingly, in spite of its strong reference to reality, photography nevertheless appears like a chameleon that can change its hues to suit its environment. A photograph’s very meaning can be completely altered, depending on how it is deployed. Given the way that the boundaries of photography have expanded in recent years, we have to be aware of just how media-savvy viewers have now become if we are going to be able to use photography to shape a new, independent and self-defined visual world—as exemplified by Shirana Shahbazi’s work.
This, then, is the situation in which photographers and artists are presenting their work today. The remarkable number of 250 portfolios submitted by artists recently arrived on the Swiss photographic scene came as no less a surprise to us than the realisation that one or two of the themes that dominated the Nineties have since faded into the background again—or perhaps over-satiated curators simply found them less exciting. The previously ubiquitous obsession with identity and the self in the context of predetermined life concepts has taken a back seat, or at least undergone a transformation. The same applies to media work in the stricter sense of a concentrated reflection on the media. This, too, seems to play a less dominant role now, or, rather, is being placed in a different, broader context. By contrast, it was striking to note that some of these works operate in an area between reality and fantasy; that enormous realism can be generated by fictional means, and that the imaginary can be cloaked in the garb of scientific certainty. Moving in hybrid zones and in-between realms appears to have become more commonplace. Encountering the absurd, the inconceivable and the uncanny (whether in the mind, or on the local scrapheap) has become more widely accepted. In a sense, we are no longer as firmly grounded as we once were. But rather than being a cause for complaint, this is now being lived out as a freeform dance in the space of reality, fiction and signs.
Photography invariably builds up a membrane, a trompe l’oeil screen which is as inscrutable in its radiance as it is dazzling, depending on how the photographer wants us to see it. In the course of time, however, we begin to glimpse into the wings, to see behind the backdrop, and we begin to see through the machinations and constructions by which it is staged. Once things have come full circle, it all seems perfectly unambiguous again—merely matured by a couple of decades. Though this process may always have been inherent in photography, it is very much intensified today. The revolving stage now moves from reality to theatre and back to reality, or vice versa. Some of the works selected for the exhibition and catalogue have a built-in shoehorn, as it were, that lets us slip easily in and out, switching back and forth—rather like the drawings of M.C. Escher.
We have staked out three areas to which the 21 different positions might be tenatively allocated.
1. Works that explore the world in the broadest sense, looking outwards and asking what is happening and by what means the things we see and experience can be analysed and portrayed.
2. Works that construct a world of their own, drawing upon the real world to create fictional works that dissolve and hover over reality with fantastic freedom.
3. Works that address contemporary existence, the search for stability, the quest for the origins of community, and ask where the self is situated in all this.
EXPLORING THE WORLD
The large-format suburban photographs taken in New England by ANNA KANAI during her studies at Yale are pictures that explore the world. Through a veil of bare winter branches and undergrowth, they show condominiums and suburban houses, partly obscured, yet still recognisable. A semi-permeable membrane permits furtive (fictional) communication in both directions. There is something slightly voyeuristic about these images gathered by a seeker, an explorer, a revealer of things, on her forays through the tamed undergrowth. They show a world determined to screen itself from the gaze of others. Revelation seems unwanted here, and introspection sought all the more. The intertwining branches read like a natural organic fence against intruders and, in spite of the windows, the façades appear to be closed. The other is kept out and excluded. The title she has chosen for one of her works, Not my Chalet, emphasises this sense of otherness, of not-belonging. In her photographs, Anna Kanai frequently merges the before-and-after into a fine, transparent membrane that becomes a metaphor for the mixture and mutual dependence of otherness and alienation, the excluding and the excluded.
In his long bands of multi-part photo series, redolent of stills from unshot films, MARCO POLONI explores the relationship between perception and representation. He asks where they meet, where one or the other is dominant, and whether we really do see what we want to see or should see. His interest in visual communication is closely related to his interest in political issues. In Shadowing the Invisible Man he uses a multi-perspective camera to follow a fictitious immigrant on his journey from southern Italy to Switzerland. We experience this journey from the point of view of both the immigrant and the person shadowing him without ever actually seeing the protagonist himself. In AKA Poloni similarly seduces our gaze, exploring the ways in which our perceptions are manipulated, by presenting, in many black-and-white photographs, situations that suggest the presence of a potential terrorist. He addresses the uncanny in society as part of a prescribed perceptual construct. In his latest work, Permutit, he explores manifestations of power, using figures of rank and status, grey-haired fifty-somethings in dark suits, alone, in pairs, or accompanied by elegant women, in settings charged with meaning: Dallas, where John F. Kennedy was shot, Washington D.C., the Pentagon, the Enron building in Houston, Texas. The experience he conveys in this work is that of social invisibility. The ladies and gentlemen we think we are following are proxies—the real bearers of power remain invisible. Often, Poloni’s CinemaScope-format photographs run through the room like a film. In the catalogue and in the exhibition he works with shortened film sequences. On the one hand, the work of GORAN GALIC and GIAN-RETO GREDIG thrives on the love of images, on the fascination with the image that draws us into this world, while on the other it thrives on iconoclasm, on doubting the power of the image, on the notion that images are seductive and illusory, and that only through language or a suitable order can they be given a context in which they become legible. In their search to uncover the truth of the Bosnian conflict, Galic and Gredig are also seeking the truth of the image in general. Setting out for his parents’ homeland to tackle the accusation that the Serbs are to blame for everything, Goran Galic, together with Gian-Reto Gredig, find themselves confronted by the question: who tells the truth of the image? The person who explains the image also determines it. But if there is no such explanation, misunderstandings arise and the scope for interpretation widens. Thinking about the image brings both these artists back to the question of society. Only those who question it, who find a flaw in the image and use it as an opportunity for understanding, for looking through it to see what lies behind, will be prepared to rethink their own viewpoints, their own origins, before taking action. “In my Bosnian homeland there was a clash of contradictory views of reality, as conveyed by language and image. These mutually exclusive realities led to war. Even today, the situation is still wearing the country down. Many see consensus as a prerequisite to getting to grips with the situation. But instead, the gap between the different perceptions has widened.” (Goran Galic) The two artists hope that they can create a level of discourse by means of photography, video and text.
In False Chalets CHRISTIAN SCHWAGER presents a documentary work about the trompe l’oeil military architecture that is a singularly Swiss phenomenon: military bunkers in the guise of chalets, barns, pumping stations—built or even painted to evoke some historic, timeless or modern style. These are the kinds of illusions we might expect of photography itself, because photography is always an illusion (in the spirit of the author) in that it changes the essential nature of found reality into what we are supposed to see in it. Schwager uses photography to document the illusions constructed by the Swiss army. Mind you don’t bump your head on the door—it’s only a painting! No chance of a beer here—it’s nothing but a concrete crate! These backdrops form a peculiar architectural camouflage embedded in the everyday world of landscapes and villages that have rarely, if ever, seen a war.
The work of SERGE FRÜHAUF takes a casual yet precise look (or a precisely casual look) at the coincidental situations in which buildings clash to form innocuous yet quite remarkable little monstrosities. These are the freaks of everyday architecture, the stuttering, stammering, babbling syntax of concrete-speak; the unintentional, helpless clash of buildings. The photographs are taken so casually that Frühauf only just manages to avoid giving us the feeling that there is some trick involved—some Magrittesque trap we have to recognise in order to pass the test. It is as though Frühauf's constructions seek to prove that architecture has completely lost its way—in planning terms—since the days when brick was quietly placed upon brick, since the advent of shuttering and formwork and casting and concrete. Formal vocabulary and materials clash. Frühauf’s series, begun in 1997, is open-ended and thus remains a work in progress, like an architectural chronicle, or an inventory of chronically sick architectural landscapes. His slant on things shows the situation as it is, with examples of brutalist architecture that are almost endearing in their ugliness, like illegitimate offspring that need to be consoled for never being able to claim noble lineage.
The work of KÖRNER UNION, by contrast, seems almost banal in its documentary approach using central symmetry and direct shots in which the white of the garage walls is taken seriously and light is brought into the darkness. At the same time, these photographs of interiors and buildings transform themselves into pictures of discovery, showing what lies between the layers. In this respect, they recall Daniel Spoerri’s Tableaux Pièges (Trap-Pictures) of tables, complete with dishes and food, tipped into the vertical and hung on the wall, transforming the everyday into nouveau-realist art. Körner Union’s accumulations reflect a world of pristine bourgeois values, even in the garage: the carefully packaged winter tyres, the wood for the fireplace, the skis and ski-boots and bikes, all set in this white, unambiguous showcase of Swiss middle-class life. Wheareas the food almost fell off Spoerri’s up-ended tables (a nightmare for the restorers), here we have the urge to up-end the square white garage boxes and cram them full. The documentary photograph becomes a world-picture with narrative tendencies, yet at the same time it verges on colour-field abstraction.
CONSTRUCTING THE WORLD
When we stroll through the world, glancing here and there, taking in various displays, and suddenly chancing upon some lovely nook or cranny, some exciting play of light and shadow, or catching the inkling of an image that draws us in, there is less serendipity involved than we might think. After all, we carry around so many images in our heads, more or less consciously, they occupy our thoughts to some degree. These are the images that guide the way we see and allow us to find their equivalents in the world outside. We have, as it were, already determined in advance what it is we have to find. This process invariably involves an element of “constructing the world”. Marianne Engel’s pictures contain something of this interaction in that they portray nature in a very natural way, altered and accentuated only by the influence of light. The real world thus serves as a stencil through which the light falls, bringing the underground to life. Some of the following works eschew the real almost entirely, drifting instead into the imaginary and the uncanny, entering the realms of fiction.
CRISTIAN ANDERSEN fabricates reality, or that which appears to be real. He morphs real elements in fantastic ways and holds them in limbo so that the constructions, in turn, look almost realistic: So close you could hit it with a stone. Yet there is no way in. The two levels seem to be both connected and at the same time separated by shatterproof glass. Cristian Andersen is a stage designer of reality, a constructor of fictions that seem to say, laconically, “That’s the way the world is. Or, then again, maybe not.” He interweaves the real and the imaginary, creating two overlapping worlds. Like the officer and the couple with the child in his picture, we stare at one of his scenes and shade our eyes with our hands to avoid being dazzled, so that we can see more clearly what is going on. Seeing treble: we are looking at him looking at them looking. Within these alternating views, reality disintegrates and regroups, interlocking and dovetailing to the point of such fluidity that a new reality is generated. Andersen’s pictures are contemporary riddles that touch upon the issues of human existence in our time, casting up questions as a “gust of wind casts up discarded plastic bags and flings red buttons against a wall. His works are pop-culture allegories of street life to be plunged into only by those unafraid to get their hands dirty— or their thoughts, for that matter.
ROCKMASTER K, indefatigable icon of the urban underground, artist, DJ, musician and filmmaker, creates a contemporary and future gallery, in which he himself is a demiurgic figure, using portraits of friends and figures from the worldwide web. His morphed figures are representatives of a broken, fundamentally changing world. They laugh, cry and “think” into the picture, drawing back various curtains. Moods of irony, sarcasm and romance waft through the gallery, creating a fragile, lost vision of a future teeming with computer-generated hybrids, ambiguities and dislocations. The figures seem to inhabit a world in which what was once normal has become unfamiliar and incomprehensible, pointing towards a future populated by composites of nature and technology, laughter and tears, men and women. Rockmaster K’s pictures have the grainy rawness of low-budget productions.
Whereas Rockmaster K creates strangely appealing creatures, MARIANNE ENGEL seems to wade into the underbelly of a timeless “everytime”: she explores spaces and landscapes like a psychiatrist delving into the depths of the subconscious. She uses torches, street lamps, camera flash and long exposures to tease colours and shapes out of the darkness of the night, generating a membrane, an in-between world, in which everything seems to come alive, to be colourful and present. Nightscapes turn into fantastic psychological landscapes, like caves explored by the light of a helmet-lamp. Trees become creatures, ordinary homes become witches’ hovels—deliberate references to the fantasy world of childhood and fairytales, to the timeless archetypal depths and mysteries of the human psyche.
RUTH BLESI, too, mixes the real and the imaginary, the analog and the digital. Her “imagineered sculptures” are, as the term suggests, both imagined and engineered. Technoid sculptures made of black modelling clay are cast digitally into landscapes which she has photographed on her travels. Like some contemporary alchemist she concocts her potion of individual ingredients to conjure up a fictional, even sci-fi, world. We are plunged at times into a shadowy, damp, murky netherworld, only to soar again into a brilliantly radiant outer space. Blesi’s fantastic world blurs the boundaries of imaginary, present and future realms.
Circus, the video work by COLLECTIF_FACT, addresses the construction and perception of space in an alluring and idiosyncratic way. It is based on photographs of the Place du Cirque in Geneva and consists of a double projection across a corner. The three artists photographed this busy square and then animated the photos to create a surging swell of images that set the city in motion, breaking it down and reconstructing it. “Fragments of urban architecture, signs and passers-by hover and hurl towards us with dizzying incalculability. Photographs of a real city are used here to generate a sense of space that refers indirectly to the virtual 3D worlds of computer games, at the same time deconstructing their unequivocal and hermetic spatial order and hyper-realistic graphics.” (Katrin Mundt) The projection explodes every form of static photographic portrayal and, in doing so, comes closer to the dynamics of urban space and the way we ourselves perceive it in reality: on the move, our eyes constantly transmitting millions of miniscule impressions to the brain, rather than as a continuous, coherent film-like image.
CHRISTIAN WALDVOGEL is a Jekyll and Hyde of art and science, science and fantasy. He confidently presents fantastic new constructs of the world in the guise of authoritative science. He creates a panoramic landscape using the first images of Titan, Saturn’s moon, that were transmitted to earth by the Huygens probe in 2005 and inadvertently posted on the web for just a few minutes, or he surveys the north and west poles of the earth: “If we came to Earth from outer space, we would find it orbiting the sun on the same plane as the planets. This plane, known as the ecliptic, would help us to find our spatial orientation and to determine top and bottom. In this respect, the uppermost point of the earth is not at the pole, but shifts along the polar circle in the opposite direction to the rotation of the earth.” (Christian Waldvogel).
In 2004 Waldvogel represented Switzerland at the 9th Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented his utopian vision of a world turned inside out. The project, entitled Globus Cassus, proposes converting the earth into a gigantic hollow structure, providing the imaginary basis for an ideal world. Waldvogel lets a certain Dr. Gerso Chlavdilw declare: “We watch work in progress on one of the greatest undertakings in the history of mankind: transforming Planet Earth as a habitable, majestically elegant monument. Then we move closer, finding oceans, countries and deserts at the equator, with fantastic cities built on terraces like hanging gardens, then other cities, like fibres, swarms and tufts: light as a feather, awash with light and transparent to their very depths.”
He painstakingly runs through the development phases of the earth’s inversion, as though the only barrier to its feasibility were financial. He takes the question as to which social, political and economic systems might best serve humankind, and lets his imagination run free with exhilarating audacity in the creative empty space.
HENDRIKJE KÜHNE and BEAT KLEIN created an unusual mandala for the Gott sehen exhibition at the Thurgau Cantonal Art Museum in the Kartause Ittingen. It was a mandala of the world of commodities, a symbol of the ecstasy of things in the consumer world. It was made of hundreds, possibly thousands of photographs of the production and distribution of goods, cut out of brochures, ads and catalogues and mounted on board. Each individual element was juxtaposed with a second in such a way that as a whole, standing on the floor, they formed a huge piece of illusory architecture, a city that looked like the metaphor of a network (in papier mâché). It was constructed so that it was possible to approach the mandala from behind and perceive the structure as an image of architecture and the urban environment. On walking around it, we began to notice the world of commodities, the countless images of things shining out at us, and as we continued, they gradually dissolved into coloured patterns and ornamental shapes. By the time we arrived back at the starting point, we perceived this imageless architecture as a counter-world, like the cities of the former communist Eastern bloc. At the same time, this complex installation represents and questions the hegemony of western consumer culture. It is a mandala of materialism as an expression of our current mindset. Kühne/Klein have created a new version of this mandala for the Real Fantasies exhibition.
Whereas Collectif_Fact animate digital images of a real city square in a way that allows us to enter a non-linear projection and perceive the square directly from within the mind’s eye, as it were, in millions of individual glimpses each lasting fractions of seconds that make up our experience of the surrounding space, DANIEL SCHIBLI uses wooden panels, papier mâché, glass, mirrors, foils and textiles to create sophisticated “art spaces”. In his photographically generated visual spaces, there is a striking contrast between the impression that what we are looking at is actually a kind of DIY or craft-like enterprise and the awareness that this is a carefully constructed installation created with an understanding of complex worlds. These are abstract spaces with no precisely legible meaning, even when one space appears to be Japanese, the next looks like an underground cave and the third like some sort of building-site flamenco. But narrative associations are not the point here. The real point is the way they are arranged—the order, or rather, the dissolution of static order and predetermined givens. What is important is the handling of light and the play with perspectival close-up and distance, with movement, rotation, tilted planes, the use of clarity and diffuse transparency with which Daniel Schibli breaks up the very spaces he constructs and presents to us, setting them in motion and thereby setting us, as viewers, in motion too. We find ourselves dancing on a hovering, floating, submerging ice floe, as though experiencing new spaces and new worlds. Yet the stage of illusions that the artist builds is never perfect. One crack reveals another, even in the real world, thereby destroying the otherwise perfect appearance and showing us quite clearly that these are fragments of thoughts made visible.
Linear thinking is also challenged by HERBERT WEBER, who presents it, in his Lineares Denken, as a strangely wooden and tormented way of thinking. The only thing that seems to work in this picture is the elastic of the braces; otherwise the figure is evidently waiting in vain for one of the knots in the panelling to open up. Weber’s choreographed chamber pieces, most of them “plein-air” and featuring himself—nicely dressed and well groomed—as the main protagonist, address and mock the themes of everyday life and minor philosophical issues. An ironic and humorous detachment is built up with ease between black-and-white scenes and the title or subtext: The Culture of Networking plays on the reality of confusion. An Effort is Made with the chaos of organisational order. The Impossibility of Nothingness addresses the fact that there is always something that is already there or has already happened. On the other hand, his pictures visualise and embody concepts, underpinning them with a natura morte that shows a snowscape on the fringes of a forest, where Herbert Weber lies in the snow, shrouded in a white cloth, as though frozen to death—and yet, as in all his pictures, still connected by a cable to the tool of his imaging craft: the camera, operated by remote control. The photographic world that Herbert Weber creates, subtly reminiscent of a drawing, is a lyrical one, wittily charged with meaning, yet light-hearted and serene.
WORLD-SELF-WORLD
Social, cultural and economic factors have changed so rapidly in the past thirty years that they leave us gasping for air, like fish out of water, only to dive back once more into the rapids. Our lives have speeded up, its rhythms have accelerated, its inner tone intensified. Everything around us is frenetic. And at the same time, our values are slipping. Whatever we hold on to seems to dissolve, whatever we lean upon seems to crumble. The things that seem so clear and stable today will no longer exist tomorrow. We are moving ever further away from our primary sensory experience, mutating into creatures saturated by artificial and mediafied channels of information. We delegate our instincts to knowledge, our knowledge to science, and our science to economics. If we probe more deeply, we find people losing their jobs, and at home in the private sphere we find couples cheating on each other and their streetwise kids going off the rails. If we look at our lives as individuals in slow motion, in a bright light and with clearly focused eyes, we find ourselves in the midst of the most lurid film ever screened: La réalité surpasse la fiction. Our world has become a shifting world—mutable, fragile, precarious—in which we teeter on the brink of an abyss, never knowing whether or when we shall fall.
This explosion of the western world has resulted in photography scrutinising the meaning of identity and examining the carousel on which the individual spins around, with all the loss of direction and security that entails, including the exchange of roles, the free fall and the fragmentation of the self.
NELE STECHER re-enacts family photos. Using herself and her own family she opens up a kind of album, but instead of presenting larger-than-life family snapshots, she stages new ones in the style and colour of album photos. Instead of giving them captions such as “mum and dad having a bubble-bath“, she juxtaposes them with poems from her adolescence. She comments ironically on the behaviour and manners of her youth, whilst never actually providing the answer to the question of what is a real memory and what is fiction. There is a high degree of autobiographical information in this work, involving the original players and scenes fuelled by family reminiscences. But despite this, Nele Stecher’s work appears tantalisingly artificial. It is like a family theatre in the spirit of a Marthaler drama, felling the tree of solid bourgeois respectability with the sharp axe of sarcasm.
FLORENCE LACROIX has created a fictional figure named Charlotte, represented by an artist friend, to take us through the evolution of a young woman. Charlotte strikes poses, dresses up, looks for work, undresses, smiles, acts coy, parties (very much alone) and gets active. All these phases have been made into small photographic series that Florence Lacroix has collated into portfolios, like the visual diary of a contemporary European adolescent going through various stages, from overweight to skinny, from lazy to hyperactive, from conservative to experimental: “Une nature morte vivante, ennuyante, pédante, toujours dans l’attente, complaisante arrangeante, pensante perdante, peu rassurante, elle s’en vente.” (Florence Lacroix) The images are a careful blend of the casual and the styled, echoing the images in glossy fashion or lifestyle magazines. And then, as though Florence Lacroix herself had finally had quite enough of Charlotte, she gives one series the title— Charlotte Again.
Various Alpine legends tell of cheesemakers in remote mountain areas making dolls because they yearn for female company. The doll, variously referred to as Sennentuntschi, Sennenpuppe, Tolgg or Toggeli, comes to life and is put to work. When the cheesemakers leave the mountain pastures, they are reluctant to take their female figure down to the valley with them. So, as the legend has it, the doll demands that one of the cheesemakers stay with her on the mountain. As the rest of the cheesemakers finally leave their high pastures, they witness the doll killing their colleague, flaying him and spreading his skin over the roof of the chalet. KLODIN ERB and ELIANE RUTISHAUSER have adopted this legend in their work. In Baby, a painted or photographed figure comes to life, goes for a walk, goes to work, lies down, makes itself available, or sits on the sofa like a trophy akin to the antlers on the wall above. It poses for photos and paintings and, it seems, takes on an independent life. Just as the image, or photo, breaks away from the “model” or reality, just as the painting of a subject can appear more realistic than the photograph, so too does this Baby lead a witty, fantastic and mysterious life of its own. Painting and photography enter into a humorous dialogue with each other and even the frames in which they are set—with a few exceptions only the photographs are framed (in gold)—seem to smile at us in a tantalising way.
KATJA RICHTER’s work inhabits a borderline world. The brain, made of a pile of cold macaroni, cut in two, symbolises the proximity of the rational, the emotional, the reasonable and the unreasonable; shifts great and small, from normal to crazy. In her series An Eye for Your Eye, we find still lifes of sprouting potatoes and creeping mould, sculptures (skirt/stool), gestures and portraits alternating and telling of a world that is not quite mastered or even controllable. “The world disintegrates a little when I hold out my hand. Something comes crawling towards me, but because I am so short-sighted, I can’t quite make it out. That doesn’t matter. It will soon pass. Until then let me give you a tuft of hair to sit on. And an eye for your eye,” writes Katja Richter. The two large-format landscape paintings show a woman (Richter), abandoned in a misty meadow next to a bare winter fruit tree, or crawling, sliding, falling down the slope. The images play on the uncanny, the threatening, the irrational, and some seem (in a macabre way) to smile or grin.
LOAN NGYUEN’s photographs differ in many ways from the other works shown here. This is why they conclude this little history of young photography in Switzerland (just as those of Shirana Shahbazi introduce it). The most important difference between the works lies in the fact that they radiate calm—and an almost contemplative silence. There is nothing hectic about them, any more than there is anything comforting or solid about them. Loan Ngyuen’s pictures seem empty, cleansed and sparingly occupied. The colours are often subdued—controlled even in their contrasts. Behind a dune with green and brownish-red vegetation, for instance, rises the geometric shape of a red gable. The greens and reds of concrete bleached by the bright sunlight almost sink into the shadows. Within this geometry of architecture and shadow, a figure enters the stage (Loan Nguyen as actor). Finally, on an open space, a tree with a broad, expansive crown, a man dressed in white and red and a dark metal rod create a sense of tension in the empty expanse. The series is called Mobile. It plays on the fragile balance between heaven and earth, between distance and proximity, between landscape and individual, between nature and culture. The pictures deliberately avoid any clear significance. Instead, they open up, they breathe, they proffer a few signs that indicate fragile constellations. And time and again in these pictures it is Loan Nguyen who plays the active, ludic, observant figure who draws everything together.
REAL FANTASIES
Poetic visions or haikus in the manner of Loan Ngyuen would appear to be the exception in Swiss photography. What predominates is the presentation, the documentation, the analytical and, on the other hand, the fantastic and the uncanny. Here, we encounter strong blends of real fantasies and fantastic realities. The (surreal) shift from reality to fiction, from fiction to reality—which is, among other things, responsible for the emergence of an uneasy, uncanny atmosphere in the art work—is used as a means of compellingly portraying specific events or essential elements in the existence of the world. The uncanny and the fantastic serve as ways to heighten our emotional receptiveness, emphasising what is to be understood—or, at the very least, as a means of purification. Time and again, as in Surrealism, we are made aware of the depths of the repressed subconscious, and of that thinnest of skins which separates it from conscious rationality. Deploying these means touches upon the greatest social and intellectual insecurities of our time. After all, the world (and the way it is) is uncanny—and (dark) humour is the only thing that liberates us. We live in the midst of ambiguities that give us no sense of security. We float and drift, with or without a fear of flying. And so, too, do the pictures.