18 May – 18 June 2006
Vernissage: Wednesday, 17 May, 8 p.m.
collectif_fact is a group of young artists whose members come from Neuchatel but live and work in Geneva. These artists engage, through their works, above all with architecture and space, with urban life, traffic and office working situations.
Their pictorial works are based mainly on photographs which the artists themselves take specially for their purposes; the finished products, however, are digitally processed. The artists alter spatial relations: volumes become planes or lines, space is deconstructed. Given that the process of digital montage remains clearly visible, the works have an unreal aspect and the images partly recall video games. Outside and inside spaces seem familiar yet strangely different. Each project explores new relations – with a direct reference to the communities and spaces by which people are surrounded.
collectif_fact drew the attention of a larger public with their video installation circus (2004). For that particular work they photographed a lively city square and then isolated and rearranged the respective buildings, objects, people and vehicles at the computer. The individual elements thus became planar, like stage sets or staffage figures, and took on a life of their own. As a result, the content of a transparent bag disintegrated unexpectedly, and a book title detached itself from its book cover and hovered away. Superimposed layers of images constantly blend only to separate again immediately. This gives rise to the illusion of a fragmented space, although the latter had never existed as a coherent unit.
The artist-trio is now using this process for the first time in the third dimension for their exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thun. For the installation in the enter room they photographed details of the architecture. Then they isolated the spatial elements and hung the individual pictorial planes one behind the other in the room – the window panes step out of the frames, the frames out of the lintel. This process is more reminiscent of a drawing of an explosion, which here is staged spatially. We thus experience the room in a completely different way, our attention being directed to the details of the surroundings. Our experience is that of an arranged, a construed world. New links between the individual elements can therefore be conceived and new spaces invented.
Biography
Annelore Schneider (* 1979), Swann Thommen (*19779), Claude Piguet (*1977).
All three artists were born in Neuchatel and live and work in Geneva. Solo exhibitions at Galerie Laurin, Zurich (2004), Galerie Une, Neuchatel (2002) and Galerie Mire, Geneva (2001) and participation in numerous group exhibitions and video festivals. They have already been awarded prizes for their video works. See www.collectif-fact.ch for detailed exhibition and festival lists.
