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Dorian Sari
La Parade de l’Aveuglement [The Parade of Blindness]
February 23-April 12
Opening Saturday, February 22
The Swiss Cultural Center is to present the first solo exhibition of Dorian Sari in France. Dorian Sari (*1989, Izmir; lives and works in Basel and Geneva) transforms personal and collective mythologies into fictional and theatrical scenes based on psychoanalytic and symbolic interpretations of the human condition. Taking an approach that is simultaneously conceptual and emotional he turns his trenchant gaze on social movements and cultural difference. His multiple narratives, which take the form of sculptures, videos, and performances, use practices close to ritual to reveal bodies that are exposed and subjected to or resistant to coercion. In poetic language he traces the links between collective consciousness and the collective unconscious. La Parade de l’Aveuglement [The Parade of Blindness] brings together works that touch on certain subjects, gestures, or collective feelings that the artist imagines succeeding one another, as in a parade.
The exhibition will be the subject of a catalog published by the Swiss Cultural Center and Spheres Publication. Launch on March 4.
Ursula Biemann
Acoustic Ocean
February 23-April 12
Opening Saturday February 22
Ursula Biemann (*1955, Zurich) is an artist, writer, and video essayist, with a primary focus on political ecology. Her strongly research-oriented projects often involve fieldwork in remote locations: and so, too, her latest work, Acoustic Ocean, a semi-fictional account of an expedition to the depths of the Arctic Ocean in search of interspecial communication. Sami activist and singer Sofia Jannok plays an aquanaut trying to capture the sounds of animals and microorganisms; and a memory of water teeming with life fuses with the prospect of an uncertain climate future. Filmed in the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, Acoustic Ocean is a quest propelled by assembling perfectly interdependent human, marine, mechanical, organic, climatic, and digital elements. This posthuman and feminist figuration suggests a porosity and connectivity of the human body with regard to water and the many life forms it sustains.
Manon
April 26-July 12
Opening Saturday, April 25
Since the mid-1970s, Swiss artist Manon (*1946, Berne) has never ceased to shock and delight the public, thanks to her radical approach to performance, staged images, and installations. She addresses social change, feminism, and the sexual revolution in consistently subversive ways, thus inscribing her viewpoints in contemporary discourse on unequal power relations and notions of identity and gender.
The exhibition will be the subject of a catalog edited by Kunsthaus Zofingen and published by Scheidegger & Spiess, with the support of the CCS.
Claudia & Julia Müller
Une brève histoire de baskets sales [A Brief History of Dirty Sneakers]
April 26-July 12
Opening Saturday April 25
Claudia & Julia Müller (*1964, *1965) present familiar or mysterious situations in large hand-drawn murals in which figurative representations mingle with ornaments, abstractions, duplications, and fragments. Drawing on their vast archive of images, they examine matters such as seeing and being seen, power relations, the relation of affection to animosity, thereby taking careful note of a whole range of contradictions in human existence. Their exhibition at CCS uses portraiture to zoom in on puberty—a threshold moment of transformation, fragility, and personal quests.
