Silvie Defraoui: The Tremor of Certitude

Silvie Defraoui (b. 1935, St. Gallen) is a major figure of the Swiss art scene. Throughout her long career she has examined the flow of images that saturate our daily lives to reveal their strata and conventions, and the issues they raise. Cut-up and reassembled photographs, videos that are screened on the wall or floor, on sand or salt, traditional canvas pictures and neon lights—the artist has employed a range of mediums that bring together texts, symbols, and graphic elements, like a rich trove of clues from which to rethink the narratives of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

All of Silvie Defraoui’s output is part of the Archives du futur, or Archives of the Future, an ever-growing artwork-institution created in 1975 with Chérif Defraoui and which the artist has added to on her own since 1994, the year her partner passed away. Like a network of ideas, this corpus forms a long commentary on a number of questions—the image, memory, and the connections between space and time.

The Tremor of Certitude offers an overview of Silvie Defraoui’s work over the last thirty years, while showcasing the plurality of mediums characterizing her output. She questions our relationship to the image and the way images indeed mediatize reality, inviting us to see the impermanence of the present as one of the conditions of human experience. As the artist puts it, “Archives du futur means looking at the present to know what tomorrow is going to be made of.” For what is peculiar to the present moment is indeed that it is always in motion. It is forever weakening our certainties, demanding constant reevaluation of the stories, images, and motifs making it up.

Working by themes, Silvie Defraoui highlights processes like transformation and metamorphosis (notably in her photo-based compositions), as well as geometry and the decorative character of writing (in her paintings and neon-light installations). Projection—of the image itself but also of thought, remembrance, hopes—is one of the processes favored by the artist, along with framing, which sets of, constrains, and contains any representation. Throughout Silvie Defraoui’s works there are spaces in which personal stories are woven into the fabric of history.

Museum Director and Head of Exhibitions: Juri Steiner
Exhibition curators: Laurence Schmidlin and Elisabeth Jobin

Publication
Laurence Schmidlin (ed.), Silvie Defraoui. Le tremblement des certitudes, with an essay by Laurence Schmidlin and a preface by Juri Steiner, co-published by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne and Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2023 (French/English/German), 120 p., 76 ill.

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