Utopia Today x REX Box
9.–29.11.2023, daily, 13:30 to 24:00
11.11.2023, 16:00 to 17:00 in room REX2: Andrea Domesle in conversation with Olivia Abächerli, Andrea Vogel and Frank Westermeyer.
Kassenhaus des Kino REX Bern, Schwanengasse 9, 3011 Bern.
Artists: Olivia Abächerli, Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer, Natacha Nisic, Laure Prouvost, Andrea Vogel.
Curated by Andrea Domesle, Basel/Beatenberg.
“Secret Gestures“
Our ideas about the future are formulated by us in the present. However, this is not always achieved in a fully understandable and intelligible way. This may be due to the fact that we first have to deliberate about the new and search for words. Perhaps we even need to create new terminology. Visual arts tend to leave space for ambivalence – after all, there is an ambiguity in the juxtaposition of pictorial elements. Artists are well equipped to make use of the expressive possibilities of colours, forms and aesthetics, in particular to express the incomprehensible, or the intangible. This does not only apply to the surrealists, who nonetheless, focused on the unconsciousness.
The videos presented in the November programme follow this tradition. And since video is a cinematic medium, the moment of incomprehensibility can be particularly well captured by means of gestures. The reference to handling an object is removed; the meaning of the gestures becomes empty in certain situations and detaches itself from the body of the speaker.
Another method would be to close our eyes to escape the visible chaos and to dream of a better world.
French and Swiss artists have been selected to mark the official visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to Switzerland.