In the midst of a pervasive distrust of reality, the field of the perceptible world is becoming ever more closely tied to subjective experience. “Entangled Events” brings together works by young artists active in Switzerland who examine this changing relationship in order to attempt a reconciliation instead of the progressive isolation. The works focus on the potential of not thinking in opposites but with them and in the space between. Through videos, installations and performative moments, the connections and entanglements of individual events are traced. Events, which in the works do not merge into static truths but into a constant process of becoming. The artists document and stage phenomena, demonstrating how singular moments are products of collective relationships while at the same time each collectivity is constituted by singular phenomena. In so doing, the artists draw attention to a shared world and its dynamic configuration.
The new work by Camille Aleña takes as its starting point the story of the encounter between two antagonistic youth groups—Emo and Truzzi—in Rome, which she cinematically condenses into a narrative of its own. The work raises questions about the effect of narration as well as the role of documentation and staging. Mohamed Almusibli similarly uses the imagination to access past events. In the exhibition, a family history that was never documented is transformed into a document of a different kind: photographs generated by AI simultaneously bear witness to the future and a nostalgic past. Through her research-based practice, Camille Kaiser traces the transport of monuments from Algeria to France. Examining and reframing the images, the artist creates a narrative that testifies to the moments in between and illuminates the processes of historical transitions, their tangible and intangible traces. Roman Selim Khereddine negotiates the mediating function of images: In the exhibition, he presents a two-part video work that documents two different yet similar activities of constructing. The attempts at imitation depicted in the work are not merely revealed as deception, but are questioned in terms of their claim to reality in parallel with the artistic activity. Drawing from her research on affects and nudges, Eva Zornio examines emotion as a means of shaping form. In the exhibition, she presents a video and challenges the visitors’ behavior through spatial interventions, raising awareness of fields of action in the interplay between emotion and reason. Fields and possible scopes of action are also tested in the work of the art collective Natalie Portman. By means of representation and staging of figures, they exert a formative effect on their surroundings and at the same time render the result of such activating forces visible.
at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen
until November 6, 2022