On an autumn day, within the context of prepa-
ring for an exhibition project, I was standing in an empty factory building in Geneva. The changes associated with the Berlin Wall were still a thing of the future. As I wandered among the regularly spaced columns on the vacant factory floor, I could not help but think of a number of criteria for exhibition spaces presented as necessities: solid walls, the white of those walls, entrances, series of adjoining rooms, and their influence on the act of exhibiting. At that moment it became clear that my own contextual perspective was very much bound up with a booklet Zaugg had published two years previously. In the recurring debate over whether architecture is the artist’s ally or his adversary, or whether, in view of the givens, one would simply could-shoulder it, I have often brought up the incisiveness of the text by Rémy Zaugg. Because that text is an artistic work which intervenes in precisely the debates that characterize the history of the development of artistic practices in and with architectural space to the present day.

…serves all readers as well as art-historical discourse – though in this case also the person of Anna Winteler who is both professional physiotherapist and a public person – as the place where the biography is fixed. Information regarding the origins and the life of any given artist are standard in a framing introduction and reflection upon works.

The exhibition comprised a representative selection of photographs by renowned German photo-journalist and traveller Leonore Mau. Presented next to a 16 minute audio interview with her, conducted by the artist, a reprint of selected magazine contributions by Mau from 1962–92 was featured.

…the first avatars appeared in the art world,
while community-engaged practices reflected upon the contradictory urban societal condition.
In Vancouver during this time, artist Rodney Graham produced three video works, one after the other, and declared it a trilogy. All three narrate a male character living under marginal conditions in the historical past.

Anna Winteler groeide op in Neuchâtel, in het Franstalige deel van Zwitserland, en werd in de jaren ’80 internationaal bekend met haar videowerk. In 1991 besloot ze een punt te zetten achter haar artistieke bedrijvigheid. Toen ik haar de afgelopen zomer toevallig ontmoette, stonden haar naam en haar werk me nog helder voor de geest. Na een eerste gedachtewisseling besloten we een afspraak te maken voor een gesprek over de omstandigheden en de motieven die haar tot haar beslissing hadden aangezet. Met Anna Winteler sprak ik ongeveer vijftien jaar nadat ze een punt achter haar artistieke werk had gezet.

The project developed for the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris, was based on the proposal to build a functional copy of the exhibition gallery West Africa/Ivory Coast, originally designed in the 1970s, and to place it in a central area of the museum, on ground floor level. This exhibition architecture and space was to be offered to a number of contemporary visual artists, designers, and filmmakers from Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Conceived, written, and prepared for being published in a German art magazine, to coincide with a gallery exhibition. Next to an interview conducted with the director of the Stuttgart Ethnographic Museum, seven illustrations were painted, based on activities in the very museum.

Puppet characters from different national versions of the children’s TV program Sesame Street have been materialised as human size costumes. The hybrid group appears in a theatre-like setting, against a background of a painted city panorama, activating the space of the exhibition, which constitutes the work.