HOUSEWARMING
with: Michael Beutler, Agnieszka Brzezanska, Vincent Kohler, David Renggli, Damien Roach, Uglycute, Jenny Vogel / Curated by: Gianni Jetzer
November 8 – December 23 2006
Opening reception: Tuesday November 7, 6 – 8 pm

The SWISS INSTITUTE (SI) is pleased to present the first exhibition curated by its new director.

HOUSEWARMING brings together a group of international emerging artists producing work that refers explicitly to the arrangement and designation of space. Mounting shows means continuously moving objects in and out of rooms. They are installed with great care, only to be removed again a few weeks later. The presence of changing artworks actually constitutes new space. In the slender volume ‘Art and Space’, Martin Heidegger proposes an unexpected inversion to the conventional reading of space. To discover a space’s essence, we must think of it as active, constituting itself by the presence of its contained objects.

Michael Beutler (Germany) constructs his installations as a direct reaction to the exhibition space. With the help of self-constructed machines he mechanizes the production process. The single elements are stacked to form bodies in space and make physical contact with the architecture of the building.

Agnieszka Brzezanska (Poland) will present her home movies, in which she turns brief episodes into atmospheric images of great intensity. The films both clarify and muddy the waters mediating between poetry and grotesquerie.

Metaphorical qualities are inherent in the installations of Vincent Kohler (Switzerland). His fireplace entitled Foyer, contains a fire that has been extinguished, which rotates magically. In an appropriate play on words for HOUSEWARMING, the French word for fireplace, foyer, also means home.

David Renggli (Switzerland) often works with furniture and domestic items, piling them up to create incongruous compositions. Exaggeration and irony are key elements of his aesthetic language, with an aim to build physical oxymorons. Absurdity is deliberately administered to the everyday – sometimes beyond recognition.

Damien Roach (UK) alters reality through subtle interventions. His tipped-over coffee table at first looks sullied; but closer inspection reveals coffee stains in the form of palm trees. Through the hidden motif a shift in scale occurs, transforming the tabletop into a vista.

The collective Uglycute (Sweden) create a pastiche of good taste Swedish design with furniture, that functions on a social level. The constructions for the SI will be developed in a workshop with the institute’s staff formulating its own vision of furnishing the space. Part of this work will remain permanently at the SI.

Jenny Vogel (US and Germany) weaves history and contemporary media as a method to re-interpret meaning. For Housewarming she will enter into a multi-media dialogue with Martin Heidegger, responding and playing off his musings about how art functions within and defines space.

Housewarming is made possible in part from support from IASPIS.