Swiss Art Awards 2024
Shown Works:
Solitude Recursion
2024
Foolish little Dreams
2024
Crying Corner
2024
Solitude Recursion is a table-like sculpture with a built-in solitaire board game. The handmade ceramic game pieces reflect the viewer 85 times in succession, creating a sense of repetition. Exploring themes of time, its irreversibility, and the inevitability of human mortality, the work also questions the increasing individualism and loneliness driven by late-capitalist structures. The game itself offers almost infinite strategies on how to solve or failure it, mirroring the ongoing circle of failure and new beginnings in a globalized world. Inspired by the shape of a conference table, typically found in office and government settings, it intentionally lacks functionality. With no chairs and fragile materials, it promotes a distanced confrontation with intimacy and symbolizes the fragility of time within the frame of human experience.
Foolish Little Dreams is inspired by cages for rabbits that are made to play in dollhouses. Its imagined construction with an unusual number of boxes creates an analogy to the cage batteries used in agriculture for mass animal husbandry. If the world is now more accessible to us through its miniaturization, it seems plausible that the desire to exercise power and the control of empathy through targeted processes of trivialization and play contribute to the internalization of these very power structures. Even as children, we learn to distinguish between humans and animals and break this distinction down into countless other parts over time. Pets are not the same as farm animals, as we form an emotional bond with a creature that we call by its own name. At the same time, we distance ourselves from those animals that are only marked with a number and delivered to the halls of the meat processing industry, where they are economized as disenfranchised bodies. If the title refers to the dream of many children to own a pet or even a farm, it is also an allusion to how we transfer our dreams and desires onto others. The rabbit in the play cage becomes a projection screen for human desires.
As a site-specific installation, Crying Corner refers to the visualization of silent crying in a corner, as suggested in many narratives of film or literature. It ironically reflects on the repression of certain emotions into the private sphere, and how the process of collective rationalization and shaming of these emotions takes place as we become adults. The way in which the curtain slides across the rail in Crying Corner is not by chance reminiscent of the sound of the curtains once used in trains and buses, or the curtains still used in passenger airplanes to divide the respective classes. Its centered division into two parts also refers to the curtains used for theater stages, which serve as a separation in terms of time and content during scene changes, intermissions, and at the end of the performance. When visitors sit down in the installation, they momentarily withdraw from the world theater, as the deliberately short curtain conceals their faces, creating not only intimacy but also anonymity. Through its dialogue and certain dependence on the exhibition space, Crying Corner is able to give the entire installation a decisive spatial and interlocking character and create an additional level of reflection—a space within a space, so to speak.
