Simply Nature x REX Box x HKB Mediothek

Missing Fire

Artists: Veronika Pfaffinger, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Rebekka Friedli, Julia Borderie and Eloïse Le Gallo.

Curators: Stanislav Kholodnykh, Videocity Assistant Curator in Ukraine, with support from the Swiss and British Videocity teams.

This exhibition unfolds a story of four distinct ethical behaviour cases concerning non-humans in the given outdoor environments. Practicing acts of minimalistic care in the urban environment, going outside the cities, the artists work with their own tools, motifs and lenses. The resulting works are connected with the past, be it the past of places, of actual materials or the past of the art history suggested by the very methods of the artists. Which nature do their works show us? What kind of nature do they refer to? The images we see connect to the regions of our psyche that become knowable with the help of images of mountains, lawns, ponds, forests – in a word, through nature. But what is the nature of the images themselves, which is rather different from the nature of the materials with which they have been created? Perhaps, we might find it helpful to notice the fire of human progress, which warms and deserts everything in its all-consuming path, asking us not to value gardens over deserts, or their hybrids over each individually, but rather consider them in their own right.

Thanks to Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains for the loan of the work by Julia Borderie and Eloïse Le Gallo; to the Austrian Cultural Forum Bern for supporting the participation of Anna Mutschlechner-Dean in the talk and to SüdKulturFonds for the support of Stanislav Kholodnykh.