David Bussel, i-D, June/July, 2002, p. 172 Olaf Breuning Yes, you should be scared Making Ozzy Osbourne look like a chartered accountant, Olaf Breuning inhabits a weird, wonderful world of his own making. His photographs, installations, performances and videos are a heady mix of Goth, trash culture and Theatre of the Absurd, with a bit of Baroque art thrown in for evil measure. That he hails from the northern Swiss town of Schaffhausen and lives between Brooklyn and Zurich is somehow no surprise. His working process is similarly appropriate: "It is always the same - I sit at my table, looking out the window, and think about what is next. I close my eyes and dream around. When the snowball is ready, I take it and throw it down the mountain and then wait for the sound of the forthcoming avalanche…" The resulting forms break down the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and simulation, creating a hybrid world of genre-crossing images, populated by bizarre humanoid types from another dimension. He draws inspiration from advertisements, fashion, film, art history and music videos, 'virtual data' that gets 'remixed' into his work. Current interests include John Carpenter's Ghost From Mars, Martin 250 (an intelligent light machine), hillbillies, skeletons and BBQ Boogie (an R&B radio station). Breuning's tableaux-vivant arrangements are staged with amateur actors or mannequins in full make-up (and copious wigs), dressed in costumes resembling anything from cavemen and knights to Vikings. His lo-tech sets look like jungles or forests from a kitsch horror film, their creepy lighting and electronic music only adding to the general eerie effect. "My work should be like a trap: the cheese smells good but then you are confronted by a lot of unknown and weird things to think about. My compositions contain familiar images and sounds that create problems and uneasy situations. Recontextualized, they are recognizable but their narrative meanings shift. I am most interested in the languages and stories of the masses: it is not up to me to teach a German cow how to speak French." Exactement…For his exhibition at the Swiss Institute, Breuning will produce an installation combining sound, light and a Realdoll (virtual sex toy), amongst other things. "I work with extreme materials and extravagant objects that I find in the city streets and on the Internet," he explains. "Yesterday, for example, I found a funeral casket with a sunset airbrushed on it…something like that interests me at the moment. High glossy materials together with death and pleasure."