ATTITUDES
with Aebersold x Handberg, Mirjam Plattner, Laure Marville, Martina Lussi A group show curated by Louisa Behr
14 Sep – 5 Oct 2019

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Press Release

ATTITUDES

with Laure Marville, Martina Lussi, Aebersold x Handberg and
Mirjam Plattner
Curated by Louisa Behr

Exhibition: 14 — 28 September 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday 14 September 5—9pm

The group exhibition Attitudes has evolved from the question of how our sensual experiences and their interpretations are based on our everyday observations, more precisely on our auditive and visual perceptions. Five artists who work with different materials, visual expressions, and partially with the idea of sampling and compiling information, were commissioned to create new or for the site adapted works. Their practices focus on provoking a dialogue between the artist and the visitor, with the artwork assuming the role of a sensual transmitter–ranging between purposeful suggestiveness and detachment, mostly without proposing concrete subject-matters.

Pay Attention by Laure Marville (*1990) functions as the exhibition’s opener and is an adaption of an existing work, here installed on the outside façade, where it is exposed to the weather. Using this prominent place, the written messages receive the first attention before the visitor even enters the exhibition. The work is provoking as well as critically shedding lights on our ways of perceiving. Laure Marville explores the capacities of written language by using the idea of sampling texts, thus making the content accessible on different levels. How important is our social-cultural background in this process of interpreting and especially how important is it to consciously change our perspectives every now and then? The exhibition invites to leave our culturally determined point of view and freeing ourselves to new experiences.

Additionally, in perceiving the art works, the audience is already challenged to leave the usual ways of reading a situation by moving around constantly, as in the immersive site-specific installation the duo Aebersold x Handberg (1988 and 1989) and the Mirjam Plattner (1992) created in collaboration for the exhibition. The work 1st fold explores ways of perceiving and approaching an architectural space and contextualizing oneself within it. By using the itemization 1st, the title already implies that there might be a 2nd or even 3rd fold to encounter. Moreso, the auratic atmosphere invites the visitor to do so. Applying stroboscope light to the room evokes experiences that reflect and bear witness to the concept of Attitudes. Despite the fusion of this collaborative act, the visitors can make out the individual traits and qualities of each artistic practice. Using a different medium,

Martina Lussi’s (*1987) newly produced sound piece I will come back to you enters the visitor’s mind through our auditive senses. As this meditative piece can be listened to through headphones, it isolates the visitors while experiencing it, while automatically guiding them to their inner self. Accordingly, she suggests to perceive it with eyes closed and while sitting. Martina Lussi provides a multileveled access to the artwork while subtly including the specific visual surrounding and at the same time leading away from it by concentrating on her meditative piece again. Playing with our perception and providing different intensities of interpretations is an important part of her work as a composer and artist.

Attitudes has developed from the thought of the curator recently diving into a–for her unknown–art scene in Basel, intensely experiencing it, and in the end trying to create a personal overview. After thinking about the reasons why exactly those five artists made a lasting impression, one commonality, which unites their artistic practice, could be identified: the exhibition is about shaping and sharpening attitudes emanating from impressions, with the thought of an artwork as an object, which always steps out of the initiated context and evokes different references depending on the individual spectator. The artists question conventions and subjective references, but without suggesting objective topics. Rather they try to initiate a dialogue focusing on the individual visitors, who from the moment they enter the exhibition are immediately connected via the act of perceiving.

The constellation of the different artists, who all live and work in Switzerland, is a suggestion to the initiating question and part of the curator’s own subjective perceptions of her time in Basel, as they form this exhibition full of impressions of experiences that shaped her attitude.

List of works:

Laure Marville
Pay Attention, 2019
Linocut on paper
320 x 406 cm
Courtesy the artist

Martina Lussi
I will come back to you, 2019
Sound piece, headphones
11 min 4 sec
Courtesy the artist

Aebersold x Handberg and Mirjam Plattner
1st fold, 2019
Polyester, stroboscope light, sound
Installation dimensions variable
Courtesy the artists

SALTS is kindly supported by Swisslos Basel-Landschaft, Kulturstiftung Pro Helvetia, Stiftung Ernst und Olga Hablützel, Stiftung Temperatio and Migros Kulturprozent