ART CITIES:Zurich-Step Out of Your Body, Enter New Ones

The exhibition “Step Out of Your Body, Enter New Ones” turns the spotlight on art that grapples with questions of community and spirituality. Seven artists of different generations probe concerns in which community and spirituality become tangible as ideas that are of immediate relevance to society and inform each other. Rather than conceiving spirituality as an individual practice divorced from the concrete realities of the world, the show reflects on its social and political potentials.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Peter Kilchmann Archive

Based on the studies “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” (1912 and “Populäre Religion” (2009), by the sociologists Émile Durkheim and Hubert Knoblauch respectively the works of the exhibition “Step Out of Your Body, Enter New Ones” converge in their engagement with the productive dynamic and process of “transcendence”.  each in its own way. Igshaan Adams is a powerful new voice in textile art, crafting large-scale sculptural weavings that shed light on complex themes of hybrid identity, race in postapartheid South Africa, generational trauma, and religion. He draws on everything from religious prayer rugs to the patterns made over time on linoleum in working-class houses across Cape Town. “The surfaces recorded the movement and the history within our homes,” says Adams, who recently had a show at the SCAD Museum of Art. “I mythologize the stories of these families”. The work of Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler engages with different sociotopes, exploring their microcosms in order to develop what are often participatory forms of art projects with the relevant protagonists. What the artists themselves titled “multiple authorship” relates to the twin sisters’ joint work, which in this case not only comprises a twofold but, in a psychoanalytical sense, brings components of multiple personalities into play, supplementing these further with the participation of other individuals. This differentiated, situation-specific working method frequently allows the Hohenbüchler sisters’ works to emerge in new forms, whereby there is no superficial preference regarding the levels of expression of particular media. The focus on different forms of materiality and textures is always being re-explored. This is also due to the fact that the twin sisters, who have been exhibiting together since 1988, themselves come from different disciplines: Irene from painting and Christine from sculpture. For both of them, the artistic act per se should be in the foreground of a discussion where the resulting product is merely the outcome of a long process of discussion and reflection. Corita Kent also known as Sister Mary Corita, was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. At age 18 she entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary, eventually teaching in and then heading up the art department at Immaculate Heart College. Her work evolved from figurative and religious to incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Throughout the ‘60s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and injustice. In 1968 she left the order and moved to Boston. After 1970, her work evolved into a sparser, introspective style, influenced by living in a new environment, a secular life, and her battles with cancer. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986. At the time of her death, she had created almost 800 serigraph editions, thousands of watercolors, and innumerable public and private commissions. For over twenty-five years, Teresa Margolles has investigated the social and aesthetic dimensions of conflict, creating sculptural installations, photographs, films, and performances imbued with material traces of death. The artist’s work most often incorporates physical remnants of violent crimes resulting from political corruption and social exclusion (blood-stained sheets, glass shards from shattered windshields, bullet-ridden walls, or used surgical threads) whose victims are otherwise rendered invisible. Tapping into the restrained sensibilities of conceptualism and minimalism, Margolles inserts post-mortem matter typically obscured from public consciousness into the architectures of civic and cultural institutions. João Modé’s artistic practice is characterized by the versatile way in which he handles visual language. In doing so, he uses a wide spectrum of diverse media. His video works, photographs, fabrics and large- scale installations often have an essential symbiotic relationship with their spatial and temporal surroundings. They intervene subtly with the architectonic space around them and unfold through the combination and bringing together of (everyday) objects or first come into being through their interaction with their specific local public. The works by Sabine Schlatter (*1977) instantly strike the viewer as incredibly emotional. They seem like journeys to an inner world of unknown entities, opening up new spaces, new abysms, and a realm of comforting tenderness. There is no black in Schlatter’s oeuvre. Schlatter sees her art as social cartography, as documentation, as a way of dealing with all that happens within and between living organisms. Not necessarily people: animals can sometimes be even more socially aware than humans. Therein lies the ambiguity of the emotional aspect in Schlatter’s work. Buhlebezwe Siwani works in performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Thematically Siwanis’ work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated sangoma, Siwani has also used her artistic practice to delve into religious subjects and the often-perplexing relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. In addition to her independent practice, Siwani is one of the founding members of the influential collective IQhiya, which was formed as an activist response to the lack of exhibition opportunity and under-representation of black female artists in the south African art world.

Info: Curator: Dr. Raphael Gygax, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zürich, Duration: 30/4-5/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.peterkilchmann.com