Naturally simple?

Artists: Ursula Biemann, Gianni Motti, Jean Otth, Jérôme Stettler.

Curator: Yves Christen, Collection FMAC – Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève.

Talk in Saal REX 2: 15.04.2025, 18:30-20:00 (free, booking required)

Yves Christen is introducing the video programme in English and showing additional video works from the FMAC collection. Following video works will also be screened:
Miranda Pennell, Magnetic North, 2003; 
Mark Lewis, Snow Storm at Robarts Library, 2015; 
Ben River, This is my land, 2006.

Like the old philosophical question of the separation between body and mind/spirit, nature and humans are often considered as if they were two very distinct entities. Among the rich and wide-ranging FMAC’s video collection, I have chosen different works showing a variety of artistic points of view regarding this complex but rich thematic. I have favoured videos from the last 20-year span, when ecological matters began to be put to the public forefront, in medias and in people’s everyday conscience. Besides scientists, journalists, politicians or associations, I think it is always rewarding and inspiring to look at artists’ perspective. They offer a welcoming and complementary worldview, “off the beaten track”, open to interpretation and never too illustrative or monolithic. Their gaze is at times poetic, sensitive, powerful, evocative, but they never seek to convince or favour a particular ideology. The selected videos “simply” (in appearance at least) offer and propose worldview on how consider our natural environment.