Shadows Collide With People

Switzerland is a country of many cultures and many languages living side-by-side within a very small territory. «Shadows Collide With People» is a multilingual exhibition in which four artists (Gianni Motti, Shahryar Nashat, Marco Poloni and Ingrid Wildi) meet one curator (Stefan Banz), each with different approaches that shift, diverge and separate again just when unity seems to be emerging.

Gianni Motti
Gianni Motti was born in 1958 in Sondrio, Italy, and grew up there. He has been living in Geneva for many years. He is a man of the world who moves throughout the world in a diversity of contexts from politics to athletics to magic. He makes this clear in his actions and installations in visual and experiential terms sometimes playfully, sometimes magically and sometimes with an irresistible immediacy.
www.artnet.de/artist/12170/Gianni_Motti.html

Gianni Motti	Blitz, Prague Biennale 2003 (Info)	GM Assistant Teheran 2003	Queen’s Golden Jubilee 2001 (Info)	The Big Crunch Clock (Info)
The Big Crunch Clock	Viale Harald Szeemann	Viale Harald Szeemann

Shahryar Nashat
was born in Iran in 1975 and grew up in Switzerland. The language of his videos and installations often lies beneath what is revealed although the surface appearances of his productions also show an inescapable presence.
www.shahryarnashat.com

Shahryar Nashat	The Regulating Line (Info)	The Regulating Line	The Regulating Line	The Regulating Line
Shahryar Nashat	The Regulating Line	The Regulating Line

Ingrid Wildi
Ingrid Wildi, daughter of a Swiss father and Chilean mother, was born in Chile in 1963, where she lived for the first 18 years of her life. She emigrated to Switzerland in the wake of increasing pressures under the Pinochet régime. She has never really felt at home speaking foreign languages and is therefore acutely aware of what it means not to possess a language and, on the other hand, to be foreign to the languages that are spoken where one lives. This is Iingrid Wildi’s subject matter in her documentation-oriented video works. What does it mean to speak a foreign language, to live in that context and attempt to chart a personal path through that territory?

Ingrid Wildi	Portait Oblique (Info)	Portait Oblique	Portait Oblique	Portait Oblique
Portait Oblique	Portait Oblique	Portait Oblique

Marco Poloni
Marco Poloni was born in Amsterdam in 1962 and spent the first years of his life in Rome and Mexico City before his family moved to Geneva. Marco Poloni's world is multilingual. This may be one of the reasons why we frequently encounter the system of translation in his photographic works or installations by means of which he makes us feel quite incapable of naming what we see, what we read and what we are confronted with until, ultimately, we can no longer distinguish between reality and fiction.

Marco Poloni mit Romas	Permutit – (Info)	Permutit - Storyboard for a Film	Permutit - Storyboard for a Film	Permutit - Storyboard for a Film
Permutit - Storyboard for a Film

Stefan Banz
The curator.

Stefan Banz

A catalogue is being published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Published by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Berne.

© Swiss Federal Office of Culture - www.bak.admin.ch