Luzia Hürzeler

Essays / s /

LUZIA HÜRZELER, So wie ich mich kenne [Knowing me], Galerie Gisèle Linder

Opening: Saturday, October 31, 2015, 11am - 3pm

03.11.2015 - 09.01.2016

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For her new installation April 1984 and 2014 (2015) Luzia Hürzeler has reconstructed a thirty-year-old slide. An off-screen voice informs us that it shows the artist as a child, next to her noticeably older sister. It is the photographer and father of the two sisters who describes the image and talks about how he took the earlier picture. In the installation the two slides are successively projected on to a screen. The old image slowly dissolves into the new one after the artist asks her father whether he could imagine taking the picture again today. The physical effect that the passage of time has on the location and the two individuals is visually surprising and leads to an oddly shifting effect. The formal similarity of the images all the more clearly emphasises the changed outward appearance of the women. Through the juxtaposition the clear-cut project of repeating a thirty-year-old photograph is invested with a strange aspect. The photographic gesture of recording is pursued to the point of absurdity, and photography’s deep-rooted temporality is simultaneously confirmed. In April 1984 and 2014 Luzia Hürzeler establishes a comparative aspect that is characteristic of her work. In her videos and installations she juxtaposes things, people or animals in a way that brings about a shift of perspective with regard to existing conditions. This can, for example, be the encounter between a lion and his stuffed grandfather (Il Nonno, 2009/2010) or, on the other hand, that between a cat and a bust of the artist made of cat food (Selbstporträt für die Katz, 2006). As had already been the case in her previous installation – How to sleep among wolves (2013/14), for which she had a sculpture of herself made by a sculptor – Luzia Hürzeler has also supplemented her visual reattributions in her new installation with a reflection on artistic authorship. By confronting the two slides with one another, the artist invokes not only a motif from the past but also the photographic gesture of her father. As a form of performative appropriation – which is also underscored by the title of the exhibition, a quotation from her father’s commentary on the picture – Luzia Hürzeler uses her reconstruction to ask questions about the links between work, creator and model. The special edition April 1984 will be released on the occasion of the exhibition at the Galerie Gisèle Linder. It shows an additional photo of the two sisters taken on the same day, shortly after the other picture. However, this time they are seen from behind, as they move away from the photographer.

Johanne Mohs, October 2015 (Translation : Michael Wetzel)