In my world
Digital Collage
2020/21
Agaba Solomon Peabo
Agaba Solomon Peabo is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Uganda. Agaba works in various fields ranging from photography to digital art. The vibrant colours of his home country’s streets inspired his love for street style photography, which he also incorporates into collages. Peabo’s work has reached wider recognition by coming second in the Mukumbya Musoke Art Prize 2020, a prize awarded biennially in Uganda. Another success marked coming second in the Uganda Young Photographer Award last year.
The people and history of Africa have always inspired Agaba's practice. His photography is situated in a liminal space juxtaposing elements of reality and surrealism. He combines digital art, an awe for nature and his love for everything street to create strikingly afrofuturistic photographs depicting the Africa of his dreams. This vision of a better Africa and the implementation of that dream serves as a daily inspiration.
Audiovisuelle Installation/Performance
Das Wasser ist niemals einsam
2021
Can Etterlin
Can Etterlin aka Abican is a pianist, sound artist, drummer and producer from Zug. After successfully completing his Jazz Piano bachelor degree at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), he is currently studying towards a Music and Art Performance Master at the same institution. Through his clear musical play, his flair for rhythm and conveying of emotions, he explores - sometimes smoothly, sometimes with friction - the tensions between acoustic and electronic music. His practice spans across various genres such as punk, pop and free improvisation. In his artistic work, Abican moves along stylistic habits and artistic boundaries, uniting supposedly contradictory things into something of his own. In doing so, he always creates something new - be it on the piano, on the synth, on the drums or on the PC, in improvisations or compositions, in installations or in performances.
Water freezes. Water thaws. Water stands still. Water flows. Water destroys. Water gives life - but above all: it leaves traces. Visibly, tangibly and audibly.
In his first audiovisual installation, which was created during the pandemic, Can Etterlin alias Abican attempts to accompany, document and reconstruct water from its origin all the way to civilisation. A two-months long reflection and engagement with sound, perspective, structure and texture of the Lower Engadine resulted in an immersive audiovisual journey.
Flags (and other short stories)
Stickerei auf Stoff
2021/22
Denys Shantar
Born in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, Denys Shantar studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Zurich and graduated with a major in photography in the summer of 2019. During his studies, Shantar realised that he did not want to stay in classical photography. Already when taking up acting classes during his previous studies, Shantar embraced the task of creating the costumes for the plays. This new passion moved him to study costume design at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he received an award for the best master's thesis in the department of costume design. Denys Shantar works as a curator for "To Be Antwerp" and the "Life Is Art Gallery".
Denys Shantar often uses his own memories and those of others as a starting point for his artistic work. He utilises different materials and techniques to create narratives that move between reality and fiction. In his exploration of belonging, identity, childhood, religion, migration and queerness, he links personal with global events. Shantar sees his flags as a diary that reflects events such as the war in Eastern Europe or the murder of a gay man in Belgium last year. The flags, more than 15 in total, are made from used and recycled textiles and were sent to the artist from Belgium, Ukraine and Armenia or gifted by people close to him. "By choosing these pieces, I charge them with memories and associations, combining the personal with found objects thus fictionalising stories", says Denys Shantar.
(___Sonate___)
Performance
2022
duodendron
duodendron conveys a feeling of joie de vivre. The two musicians know how to deal with the moment, to create tension with improvisation and to tickle
all possible sound colors out of their instruments. duodendron is the element that connects, beautifies everyday life and makes the moments together seem even more beautiful.
Like two tightrope walkers over an abyss, Jonas and Linus as duodendron move in suspension between musical worlds. In an almost miraculous way, however, they always manage to stay grounded. With a combination of
artistic ambition and musicianship, duodendron brings a breath of fresh air to the Swiss musical landscape. A fiery encounter of two musical personalities.
For the first and so far only occasion at KUNSTpause 2022, duedendron assemble their compositions into a larger complete works entitled "___Sonate___". The first movement begins in the exhibition and is moving yet static. Two melodies repeat themselves, constantly changing their relationship to each other. The second movement provides background information; about duodendron, the piece and the overall concept. The fast third movement is composed of many small parts and is entirely devoted to the art of the duo. The grande finale in the fourth movement exhibits space, time, the cycle of life and the echo of the moment in infinity.
Emily Thomas
Emily Thomas is an emerging visual artist based in Berlin. After her initial focus on painting, she now primarily works in sculpture. Since graduating from Chelsea College of Arts London in 2018, the British artist has been able to conduct her first projects at renowned institutions such as the Soulangh Cultural Park in Taiwan, La Escocesa in Barcelona and GlogauAIR in Berlin. She has won the Art Prize of the Sparkasse Culture Foundation (Karlsruhe), and has been nominated for the European Artist Award as well as the International André Evard Award.
In her practice, Emily Thomas deals with subject matters of architecture, gentrification and urbanisation. When approaching a new project, she first examines the history, community and culture of a particular place through the thematic characteristics of the buildings as well as their structural forms, materiality and colour. She then documents her observations through photography and conducts academic research to contextualise and confirm her findings. Taking into account her practical and theoretical research, she selects the most meaningful photographs to create collages and inspire drawings. Through this approach, she can analyse her images in depth and set conceptual ideas and sculptural prototypes in motion. Form, materiality and colour play a major role in this.
Her work Walden 8 deals with the residential building "Walden 7" in Barcelona, which has triggered fierce controversy regarding gentrification in the Spanish metropolis. It is also part of her sculpture series and the result of her project "In the Melting Pot", in which she explored creative factories and urban developments in post-industrial neighbourhoods of Barcelona, including El Poblenou, Sant Andreu, Sant Just Desvern and Cal Rosal (Berga). Through the process of abstraction and metamorphosis, she translated the architectural features of these places into sculptural works that reflect an ever-changing sense of place. The overall project was the result of an international exchange award between GlogauAIR Berlin and La Escocesa Barcelona, awarded by La Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez and given to Emily Thomas in 2019.
Smeared painting (Serie)
Acryl / Spray
2021-22
Isabelle Fritz
Isabelle Fritz was born in Germany and grew up in French-speaking Switzerland, where she studied at the then Ecav Fine Arts in Lausanne. During this time, Isabelle Fritz was part of a collective that included fellow students from her bachelor's degree. Together they organised the festival "Low", which served as a network platform for young artists. Fritz graduated from a Master's degree in painting in Hamburg in 2021.
Textiles are an essential inspiration for Isabelle Fritz's practice. She has been collecting them for several years and uses them as a basis for her paintings. Through photography and subsequent digital image processing, she creates sketches for possible motifs. When moving onto painting, however, these mock-ups are not followed too strictly, as the artist is also guided by the process of painting itself. Fritz’s decisions are intuitive, surprising, exciting and sometimes frustrating.
After stretching the canvas, Isabelle Fritz first uses stripes to rasterise her painting. These support the forms and allow her to build up the image freely and without restriction. In her paintings, the artist likes to play with surface and dimensionality, which she sometimes sabotages again by adding another grid. In the course of the process, the forms interweave increasingly and the stripes cross each other. Fritz follows the logic of textiles and plays with the tension between very concrete forms and a free flow of colour, with colours breaking the hard boundaries of the grid and the cut-off surfaces. Isabelle Fritz's artistic practice, however, does not solely exist on canvas. The various media she uses in her work, however, all reflect back to painting.
Verwandlung (Serie)
Acryl on Canvas
2021
Jens Bähring
In addition to his artistic practice, Jens Bähring works as a graphic designer in a web design agency, where he is responsible for the design of websites and the lead of projects. Increasingly, he would like to devote more of his time to his personal work and focus on his career as an artist. Last year, Bähring was able to participate in two group exhibitions and exhibit several of his works.
In his work "Der grüne Ritter" (The Green Knight), inspired by the 2021 film of the same name by David Lowery, Jens Bähring deals with the subject matter of masculinity, insecurity and violence. In doing so, he questions the image of men in the media and in society as well as his own perceptions and values. In this painting, the knight stands for the man who has to prove himself in order to find his place in society. The image of the man is shaped by our environment and its role models. Bähring’s painting “Ich sehne mich nach dem Leben als Künstler” (I long for life as an artist) is strongly autobiographical as well as self-critical. In it, Jens Bähring deals with the glossed-over image of the artist's life that he too had at the beginning of his creative career. The hard work and challenges of this vocation are often overlooked, which he brings to light through his painting. Jens Bähring often draws inspiration from books and films. In particular, Franz Kafka's work "The Metamorphosis", which deals with being trapped in one's own body, the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as well as artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso or Keith Haring inspire his practice.
Wearalab
Installation
2019
Marcial Koch
1994, Baar
www.marcial.ch
Shaën Rheinhart
1991, Zürich
www.ueberaktiv.ch
Andrin Gorgi
1993, Zürich
www.andringrogi.ch
Koch/ Gorgi/ Reinhart
We live in our bodies every day and yet we are often unaware of their processes and functions. "Wearalab", the collective’s project, refers to the most important database of the human body, the blood, and embodies two of its approximately 100 values in real time. The pulse and oxygen levels in the wearer's blood are visualised by the circulation of fluid and fire in PVC tubes placed over the skin. In a physically healthy body, most values agree with the norm. For example, the body of an adult contains on average about 5.5 litres of blood. The pulse rate averages 70 beats per minute and the oxygen saturation is between 92 and 98 percent. At KUNSTpause, visitors can experience their own pulse with the help of the pulse oximeter - data is transmitted directly to the "wearable". The suit controls the speed of the fluid flow, which depends on the pulse, and the number of gas discharges depends on the oxygen content. If the machine stops, the wearer's cardiovascular system collapses and in this state, clinical death occurs after 10 minutes.
"Mi Amorito" Eros
Video
2021
Laura Jana Luterbach
Laura Jana Luterbach is by no means a new face at the KUNSTpause. She exhibited her video works "Laura's Beauty Salon" and "Portals" in 2019. Still, her artistic career is relatively young. The Lucerne native first trained as a health professional and then studied to become a nursing specialist. Despite her passion, she never considered art as a realistic option. In 2019, however, she decided to study towards a Bachelor's degree in Art & Communication at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). In her artistic practice, Laura Jana Luterbach likes to explore questions around the human existence, absurdism and feminist issues. Her work as a nurse, which she still pursues today, also has great influence on her inspiration and creative practice.
Laura Jana Luterbach's video work deals with beauty standards and the search for quick and straightforward sex. Luterbach came into contact with porn at an early age and developed a crass perception of what sex should look like. Breaking away from this idea and entering into love relationships that are not based on the intense principle of eroticism is a struggle she is currently facing. With its pink colouring, her video is meant to cast a spell on the viewer and act like a pair of rose-tinted glasses that the viewer is forced to wear. Simultaneously, the sound develops into ever-increasing despair. The image is deliberately pixelated, blurred and frontal to emphasise the voyeuristic digital gaze. The mannequin stands for a conventional, ideal beauty standard. Furthermore, it also represents the silent counterpart on dating platforms such as Tinder and for the people we swipe left or right without knowing them. The judgement for a virtual match is quick, simple and superficial. Talking only happens after the verdict. The pink liquid is a metaphorical image in which Laura Jana Luterbach aims to get rid of these indoctrinated ideals.
Maja Renn
Maja Renn is an interdisciplinary artist from Zurich. Her minimalist, modular compositions combine performance, video, drawing and poetry. Based on the practice of lucid dreaming, she explores the ethics of cohabitation, questions boundaries and creates alternative perspectives. Her work has been exhibited and shown at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta (Malta), Galeria Ul in Gdańsk (Poland), Šopa Gallery in Košice (Slovakia), Casa do Povo in São Paulo (Brazil), Showroom in Arnhem (Netherlands), Villa Arson in Nice (France) and the Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi (Georgia), among others.
"Like Human" is an adaptation of a fragment from the book "Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams, in which the author describes his encounters with various species threatened by extinction. In the original text, the author tells of his first encounter with a silverback gorilla. The two watch each other from a distance, reach out to each other and slowly get closer. The monologue from the book was rewritten into an imaginary dialogue between man and animal by the artist. The film fantasises how the two perceive each other and what misleading assumptions they might make. The slow transition from one perspective to the other reveals unexpected similarities and blurs the line between the two species. The close encounter leads to the immediate realisation that it is not the animal that lacks our language, but that we as humans have lost a language. Despite this, there will forever remain a deep connection between us and this creature.
Gallinita
Canción para mi muerte
Línea Amarilla
Öl auf Leinwand
2021
Miguel Carbajal
From an early age, Miguel Carbajal was very curious and perplexed by the visual world around him. Between 2010 and 2012, he studied photography at the Peruvian Institute of Art and Design in Lima, Peru. After years of visual exploration with and through the camera, Miguel felt the need to return to the medium of painting. He draws inspiration from various art movements such as the impressionist avant-garde, German expressionism, surrealism and the art brut movement. Miguel Carbajal sees himself as a seeker. The driving forces behind his artistic work are the joy and spontaneity of the creative practice, consciousness and the connection with the environment.
Nicolle Bussien
Nicolle Bussien's artistic practice is shaped by her commitment to anti-racism work, particularly in the context of Switzerland's (post-)migration society. Her collaborative and multidisciplinary projects question the power structures of society and their representation. After completing her Bachelor in Fine Arts at Bern University of Applied Sciences (HBU) in 2015, Bussien co-founded the new Schwobhaus (studio community) and its event series "Immer Am Achten". From 2019 to 2020 she worked at the office of the Institut Neue Schweiz (INES). She has just co-founded the new community centre ‘Living Room’ in Bern. Living Room uses community building, art, expression, healing and participation to address current issues such as racism and other forms of exclusion in a transformative way. Nicolle Bussien's work has been on display in international exhibitions such as at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM Karlsruhe, D), The Kitchen (New York City, US), unframed Festival (Berlin, D) and in various spaces in Switzerland such as the Stadtgalerie (Bern), Kunsthaus Centre Pasquart (Biel) and Haus Konstruktiv (Zurich).
The video "Ich bin" (translating to “I am”) by Nicolle Bussien provides intimate insights into the transformation process of two drag queen friends and how they are being observed by the filmteam and audience. The expected linear development from "natural to artificial" is fractured through reflections, shifts and time jumps. The protagonists play with attributes of masculinity and femininity and thus break through the gender binary. The fleeting stages of putting on make-up, changing dress and rehearsing become a stage show themselves. The otherwise protected dressing room space is exposed, as rotating mirrors hang between the open dressing room and the floor-level stage, making all areas of the space continuously visible from every angle. The longer the video lasts, the more the film crew, as well as the audience, becomes visible. The observers become observed and vice versa.
Filling The Void
Stickerei auf Textil (Digitaler Textildruck)
2019
Sara Liz Marty
Sara Liz Marty was born in Zug in 1989. She discovered her passion for textiles during her art foundation at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, upon which she moved to Bath, UK to study textile design. She worked in London’s fashion industry for several years before studying towards a master’s in Fashion Futures at the University of the Arts London, where she was awarded a distinction. Sara Liz Marty has been moving away from product-orientated clothing production and is exploring different ways of using her design language. After a decade in England, she lives back in her hometown of Zug, where her creative practice explores and celebrates clothing outside of the prevalent "make - take - waste" paradigm.
In Filling The Void, Sara Liz Marty explores the tension between identity, clothing and wellbeing among London's LGBTQIA+ community. As a starting point for the project, six people from the community were interviewed about their personal experiences. The conversation revolved around items of clothing in which the participants "feel complete". Topics such as sexual orientation and its expression through clothing, community and belonging as well as the complexity of identity were all part of the conversations. Four of the six participants - all bisexual - also discussed personal experiences in a focus group with the artist. The project visually captures the search for one’s ownidentity and belonging of these people. In a multi-layered creative process, digital 3D portraits were rendered and reduced back to 2D through textile printing in various degrees of abstraction. The resulting pixelation symbolically reflects the felt incompleteness and the search for the "whole self". Embroidery processes create an additional dimension and are used metaphorically to "fill the void". Exhibited are a selection of the textile portraits.
Die Reise
Kinetische Skulptur aus Eichenholz, Elektronik und Akku
2020
Serafin Krieger
Serafin Krieger grew up in Teufen (AR) and now lives in Lucerne as an artist and aspiring art teacher. His work is regularly on display at various exhibitions - including the KUNSTpause exhibition in 2021. In 2019, his work "Rad" (translating to “Wheel”) won first prize in the OddFellows art competition of the Zentrum Paul Klee. In the summer of 2021, Serafin Krieger graduated from his Bachelor's degree in fine arts and art and design education at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) - with a solo exhibition in the cabinet of the Kunsthalle Lucerne. Currently, he is studying towards a Master of Arts in Art Teaching at HSLU.
Natural - artificial, alive - dead, movement - standstill. The work "Die Reise" (translating to “The Journey”) deals with contrasts and questions the way we interact with things and nature. A piece of wood rolls through the room seemingly of its own accord. The object suddenly turns into the subject - and develops it’s own identity. Serafin Krieger is fascinated by this humanisation of an object. Are we now able to interact with this piece of wood? Do we perhaps even feel empathy?
Portraits
Inkjet auf Fotopapier 30x45cm
2022
Soraya-Thashima
Soraya-Thashima discovered her passion for art when she was in secondary school. There it was suggested that she attends a programme for the artistically gifted in Aarau. Although she did not follow this recommendation, she started studying towards a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Zurich directly after her Matura in 2019. At the beginning of her studies, she was primarily concerned with the medium of photography. Simultaneously, the environment and sustainability are topics that hold a strong interest for her. Increasingly, Soraya-Thashima’s focus lies on observing things that - at first glance - are underestimated, invisible or even overlooked.
Building on her practice - collecting various things she comes across by chance – Soraya- Thashima scans her found objects and prints them out to scale. Everyday banal objects are portrayed and thus gain immediate attention, a higher importance and a raison d'être. Through this, the artist engages with themes of consumer society and capitalism that give little significance or appreciation to small and supposedly worthless things. Soraya-Thashima, however, finds inspiration in precisely these small objects. In her observations, she focuses on the inconspicuous things in her surroundings and brings their beauty into focus. It is this fascination and delight that she hopes to pass onto the viewer.
War without bullets
Installation aus 3D-Druck Objekt, Speaker und Malerei
2021
Yu Chunju
Born in Guangdong, China, Yu Chunju studied towards her Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts Education & Crafts and Arts at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts between 2015 and 2019. Last year, she graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia with a Master's degree in New Technologies of Art. Her work addresses the possibility of defectiveness, the circulation of the socio-economic system and the potential between body and perception. She questions the compulsiveness that comes from the deeper meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. Her work "I am going to become white" was on display in the public space at Bahnhof Neumarkt by the Junge Kunstfreunde x STRÖER, the Friends of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Museum Ludwig e.V. in Cologne, Germany. With her work "Unknown" she was among the finalists of the competition "Linee di paesaggio" of the Ministry of Culture, Sardinia. During her artist residency in V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, Netherlands, her Project "Love, not a scam" won the AI4FUTURE grant.
In her work "War without bullets'', Yu Chunju investigates the Corona crisis and the conspiracy theories associated with it. She uses the rock, as an instinctive weapon, as her starting point and refers to the rock type tektite. Tektites are glass objects up to a few centimetres in size, whose formation was caused by the impact of large meteorites on the earth's surface. Although the origin of tektites is scientifically proven, the theory that these stones are of extraterrestrial origin still circulates today. Yu Chunju's object is reminiscent of this very stone, but may also be perceived as a loudspeaker or a yuanbao (an old Chinese currency). Simultaneously, audio recordings of volcanic eruptions, comets hitting the earth and various conspiracy theories revolving around the coronavirus, the vaccine, the green passport and 5G technology can be heard. This juxtaposition of false information with tremendous disasters points to the potentially destructive power of fake news and conflicts between people caused by disagreements.
