The artists Silvia Bächli from Basel and Fabrice Gygi from Geneva will officially represent Switzerland at the 53rd
International Art Biennale in Venice on the recommendation of the Federal Art Committee. Silvia Bächli will exhibit
drawings in the Swiss Pavilion within the grounds of the Biennale. Fabrice Gygi will present his installation in
the Church of San Stae on the Grand Canal. Both exhibitions from Switzerland appear under the aegis of the
Federal Office for Culture. The Biennale opens on 7 June and runs until 22 November 2009.
Silvia Bächli was born in Baden in the Canton of Aargau in 1956 and studied in Basel and Geneva. Since 1993 she
has been teaching at the State Academy of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. She is internationally acclaimed for her
drawings, which she has consistently developed over three decades. For the rooms in the Swiss Pavilion in the
Giardini, she will present her work from 2008–2009 in the form of a spatial synopsis that affords a representative
insight into her graphic oeuvre.
Fabrice Gygi, born in Geneva in 1965, has long been one of Switzerland’s internationally famous artists. His performances,
objects and installations react in an ambiguous and confusing manner to the respective situational
context. For the Venice Biennale, the artist will transform the Church of San Stae with an installation that reminds
people of the original purpose of ecclesiastical space: to provide shelter for material as well as spiritual objects
both in normal times and in times of crisis.
The Federal Office for Culture is issuing two publications to mark the participation of Switzerland in the Venice
Biennale:
“Silvia Bächli – das”, published by Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, Switzerland, accompanying the exhibition by
Silvia Bächli in the Swiss Pavilion. Studio work from 2008–2009 and a quote by the Danish author Inger
Christensen provide an insight into Bächli’s artistic creation (136 pages, ISBN 978-3-03778-155-5).
A publication entitled “Fabrice Gygi – A Manual”, published by jrp/Ringier, Zurich, accompanies the exhibition by
Fabrice Gygi in the Church of San Stae. It contains drawings and sketches by the artist (240 pages, ISBN 978-3-
03764-057-9).
From 3 to 6 June 2009, representatives of the international press are invited to a preview free of charge at the
Swiss Pavilion and the Church of San Stae. From 7 June to 22 November 2009, the Biennale will be open to the
public. Opening times: Tue – Sun, 10.00 –19.00; Mon closed.
For further information, texts and pictures, please visit www.bak.admin.ch/biennale09
Information
Press reports: Oliver Wick, Tel. +41 79 656 20 95, e-mail: o_wick@bluewin.ch
Contacts for the Swiss contributions to the Biennale in Venice:
Dr Urs Staub, head Department Cultural Production, Federal Office of Culture, Hallwylstrasse 15, 3003 Berne,
tel. +41 31 322 92 70; fax +41 322 78 34; e-mail: urs.staub@bak.admin.ch
Dr Andreas Münch, Art Department, Federal Office of Culture, Hallwylstrasse 15, 3003 Berne,
tel. +41 31 322 92 89; fax +41 322 78 34; e-mail: andreas.muench@bak.admin.ch
Silvia Bächli
Hans Rudolf Reust, Berne
Drawings on the walls or on tables—wherever we go in the Swiss Pavilion, our gaze begins to wander, taking our
thoughts along. Silence hangs over the drawings and the spaces between them, as over a remote landscape
where much seems familiar, but which retracts in profound muteness. What is different in this constellation of
accustomed things, although they conceal no secret?
“That. That was it. Now it has begun. It is. It continues. It moves. Further. Evolves. Becomes this and this and this.
Goes on as that. Metamorphoses. Expands. Combines other with more and persists as other and more.” Inger
Christensen, det/it
Silvia Bächli (*1956) has continuously developed her drawing practice, with changing formats and techniques,
across three decades. Drawing is a movement of sight, of slight deviations and shifts in the gravitational field of
undirected attention to objects and dream elements that do not really come to rest, even in what is drawn. Some
drawings are easily legible, nameable; with others, names and words hover on the tip of the tongue, only to be
lost irretrievably after a moment: “THAT.” “I know what I don’t want: no journalistic works, no things that could
be said better in a different language. Drawing is entering new territory and walking around in it, creating space
and exploring, working with and against the edges of the paper” (Silvia Bächli, 2009). In this way, not only painterly
moments occur; a filmic view is often also cast on bodies or things or their details, on landscapes, gestures,
structures or sequences, which are caught as if in stills. Every sheet has its chosen position in the constellation
of a space, so that seeing is always in motion between images, in search of multiple connections, consistency in
the complex. All at once, a related motif returns like an echo from a far corner of the space. In the most recent
drawings, colour tones appear, almost imperceptibly, as if previously unknown nuances were being revealed
within the black and white. Drawing opens up interior spaces and expands in space without conclusively taking it
over. The weightless mobility of the smaller-format sheets implies that alternative arrangements would be possible.
A pile of drawings contains suspension into different patterns of thought on a table or a wall. Ultimately,
even the single sheet reveals itself as a process, by preserving the traces of the brush or pencil with which lines
and areas are drawn. In image theory, drawing claims a permanent preliminary status. Drawings lay traces to an
idea, and thus remain in suspense; but they also preserve the traces of their coming into being: they are irrevocably
set in place, yet vulnerable. What, in the end, differentiates the fleeting trace on the paper from the inscription
into it of a moment of spatial staging?
Silvia Bächli takes on the current conception of drawing and thus the contradiction with which, at this time, no
other artistic medium is so clearly faced: to expand upon a millennia-old tradition of immediacy. In a world of
expended and necessary possibilities, every drawing remains a well-founded question.
Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft
Confédération suisse
Confederazione Sv izzera
Confederaziun sv izra
Swiss Confederation
Federal Department of Home Affairs FDHA
Swiss Federal Office of Culture
Biography Silvia Bächli
Silvia Bächli *1956 in Baden, Switzerland | 1976–1980 Schule für Gestaltung Basel | 1977/78 Ecole supérieure
d’art visuel Genève | Since 1993 Professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, Germany | Lives in Basel and Paris
www.silviabaechli.ch
Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2009 Biennale di Venezia, Schweizer Pavillon | 2007 Nuit et jour / Night and Day, Galerie
d’art graphique, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museu Serralves, Porto | 2006 Poèmes sans prénoms, Mamco, Genève;
nordiska akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn, Sweden | 2005 Linien, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen | 2002 Frac
Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen; Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain,
Strasbourg | 2000 Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel | 1997 Kunstmuseum Bonn | 1996 Kunsthalle Bern | 1994
Centre d’art contemporain, Genève
Selected Group Exhibitions: 2009 elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris | 2008 anatomie, les peaux du
dessin, Collection Guerlain, Frac Picardie, Amiens | 2007 Swiss made I, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg | 2006 Le mouve
ment des images, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Temporary Immigration, Watari-um, Tokyo | 2004 Global world /
Pri vate Universe, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Tableau contemporain, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Stras -
bourg | 2003 Buenos dias buenos Aires, Museo de Arte moderno de Buenos Aires | 2000 Szenenwechsel XIX,
Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt | 1998 Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer, Kunsthaus Zürich and Schirn Frankfurt |
1995 Selections Winter ’95, The Drawing Center, New York
Silvia Bächli is represented by Peter Freeman Inc, New York | Erika and Otto Friedrich, Basel | Barbara Gross,
München | Vera Munro, Hamburg | Nelson-Freeman, Paris | Skopia, Genève
The publication «das», edited by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Berne, and published by Lars Mueller
Publishers, Baden, is part of the Swiss contribution to the 2009 Biennale in Venice.
Fabrice Gygi
The monotremous space
Christophe Kihm, Paris
Visitors to the Venice Biennale are in for an experience when they enter the church of San Stae. An open structure,
rising from the ground and composed of cupboards and iron grilles, will delineate their room for manoeuvre
within the space and dominate their gaze (they will be able to walk around, along and across it and inspect it
from various vantage points…). This structure occupies the geometric centre of the edifice. It temporarily re-centres
and offsets it by physically marking and symbolically re-enacting its terms. It is a store room, waiting for
objects to fill it and for people to classify or handle them. It is both a mobile and movable place, tangible in its
presence and potential in its use.
Such are the main points – delivered in their raw state – of the experience awaiting visitors. The experience will
definitely not be limited to repeating the initial exploration. Matters will take quite a different turn when the
“monotremous” space springs its trap – that kind of curious space which the artist has been constructing and
developing unceasingly in his work.
Fabrice Gygi took his first steps as an artist following in the tracks of a curious animal, a misfit in the classification
of species. 1994 saw him complete the final plate in his series of Psycopompe engravings of a stylised duckbilled
platypus bearing four prominent feet: “I used this motif at the School of Decorative Arts as a signature. This
animal served both as a means of identification and of exchange, a sign of the zodiac. Classified in the order
Monotremata, it is both bird and mammal. It lays eggs but feeds its young on its milk” 1. This immediately created
a physical and symbolic space in his technique and his body of work – between “motif” and “signature”,
“exchange” and “identification” – a space that could in turn be characterised as “monotremous”. A place, indeed,
that creates tension between two separate or oppositional levels – a transitional space where a relationship of
exchange takes place between one level and another, exuding an anomaly that challenges categories, directories
and references.
In an initial operation, the artist defines this creative process and prepares a formal plan: “Re-transcribing things
observed in the world,” keeping them “realistic” 2. To create his objects and give them shape, the artist engages
in transcriptions and reports, but also in the “transformation” and “enhancing” of pre-existing elements by
means of “simplification” and “caricature”. This demand in terms of realism calls for observation and experience
in accordance with the laws relating to a shift: Fabrice Gygi’s works come from the world, they incorporate the
imprints of other objects which – transformed by various additive and subtractive processes (material-based, formal
and symbolic) – return to the world bearing new proposals as to actions, new promises as to gestures and
new possibilities as to experiences. These experiences are associated with excursion, with walking, with fighting,
with extreme circumstances where the perception of reality is linked to the effort, to the ordeal, and where realism
is subordinate to a hostile context and to a limited state. But these moves are not exclusively physical; they
involve signs and apply twists, additions and derivations to objects that fill the world: an increase in power and
effectiveness that improves something ordinary; polysemy and multifunctionality that render more complex; neutralisation
that questions and disquiets.
This play on signs impacts their signified and their signifiers. Fabrice Gygi takes us, for instance, from camping
to the camp, and from the camp to the encampment; the features of a playground could become those of a prison
yard, or – noting other modes of derivation – a rescue object could become a weapon.
But the move from perception to transformation will always feature a passage and an exchange which, on various
levels – technical (assemblable/disassemblable, inflatable/deflatable), physical (mobile/immobile), political
(liberal/authoritarian) or moral (liberating/securitarian) – will proclaim a new course of things… Two opposing
sides will combine in the extension of forms and the interchangeability of functions: the “monotremous” space
will thus dig its hole, submitting the collection of oppositional elements to principles of equivalence at every level.
Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft
Confédération suisse
Confederazione Sv izzera
Confederaziun sv izra
Swiss Confederation
Federal Department of Home Affairs FDHA
Swiss Federal Office of Culture
The objects that Fabrice Gygi observes thus return to the world having undergone a series of transformations to
“serve as a sign”, to signal something. They include survival and protection equipment, weapons, tools, shapes
that warn of danger or threat, or that demonstrate positions of authority and/or distress.
The demand for realism articulated by the artist implies a maximal tension between the level of discourse (organising
the signs to establish a form of signage) and the level of action (the oppositional functionality of the objects,
but also their expectation of a possible forthcoming event). It follows that if the protection is actually aggression,
if the security is actually incarceration, if the password is actually an order, then the force field created by the
energising of the opposites is in an equilibrium that is as precarious as it is precise, menacing, ready to be upset
or to explode at any moment. Fabrice Gygi’s realism springs from the amplification of opposites and from the glorification
of tension: here, in the “monotremous” space which is open to the gathering of opposites, it is required
to occur in an allegorical dimension.
Fabrice Gygi creates objects, but he also produces locations where things can be stored and tidied away, within
which objects could be classified or deposited, such as the work on show in the church of San Stae gives a possible
configuration and layout. These items of furniture fulfil an indeterminate function: they both enclose and
store as well as protect, hide, prevent, restrain and welcome – objects as well as people – and what, then, would
be the nature of the threat or fear, danger or disaster, desire or willingness that would prompt their use? These
are open questions and perspectives that arise from the way this storage place resonates with the space within
which it is located, namely a church.
For this relationship between one place and the next takes the form of an exchange, of a transfer of qualities,
where the storage becomes a marker and the new centre of a church that, in a counter move, defines its conditions
of presence and understanding (as a place of culture and of worship – one that is both historical and social).
This twin constraint participates fully in the tension created by the artist’s proposal: it is a way of assigning a
“place” to the object created (inasmuch as he registers new boundaries and new references), but also of decoding
its mode of appearance, of presentation and presence in its relations with another (the level of storage and
that of the church).
It is in this encounter of the One and of the Other that the “monotremous” quality of the space is determined,
where the experience of the beholder will be required to make itself clear. The ambivalence of this space simply
prolongs that of the objects that configure and furnish it (the waiting, watchful storage furniture, its oppositional
qualities raising countless questions, linked to numerous potential events). This ambivalence drives the disquiet,
which is characteristic of the experience of these premises: above all, it emanates from the blurring of the values
produced by the stirrings of oppositional forces. When that which informs also distorts, unease sets in, and
the resulting equilibrium releases a profound ambiguity. The gaze comes under attack, but the unease is critical:
in this respect, Fabrice Gygi’s monotremous space is also a moral trap.
1 Interview with Christophe Chérix in Self-Tattoos, Cabinet des estampes (Print Room) of the Musée d’art et
d’histoire. Geneva 2001.
2 Op. cit.
Biography Fabrice Gygi
1965 born in Geneva (CH) | 1983–84 Ecole des Arts De´coratifs, Geneva (CH) | 1984–90 Ecole Supe´rieure dʻArts
Visuels (ESAV), Geneva (CH) | 1997–2005 teaching at Ecole Cantonale dʼArt de Lausanne (ECAL), Lausanne (CH) |
2005–2007 teaching at Ecole supe´rieure des beaux-arts (ESBA), Geneva (CH)| since 2007 teaching at Ecole Can -
to nale dʼArt de Lausanne (ECAL), Lausanne (CH)
Personal Exhibitions
2009 Projection of the video “Whip Fight”, galerie Guy Bärtschi, Geneva (CH), 19.03–08.05
2007 Fabrice Gygi, BFAS | Blondeau Fine Art Services, Geneva (CH), 11.11.07–11.01.08
Fabrice Gygi, galerie Guy Ba¨rtschi, Geneva (CH), 11.11.07–11.01.08
Cubes, permanent installation, Muse´e dʼart contemporain, Marseille (F), opening June 29th
Laure´ats du QuARTier des Bains, MEG | Carl-Vogt (Muse´e dʼethnographie), Geneva (CH), 24.05–5.06 | Around the
« quartier des bains » : the banners are presented in May and September 2007 end in March 2008. The Flags, on
the bridge named : pont du Mont-Blanc, are presented in May, June and September 2007.
Fabrice Gygi, COMA | Centre for Opinions in Music and Art, Berlin (D), 17.04–20.5
2006 La vide´othe`que mobile de Fabrice Gygi, Ecole Nationale Supe´rieure dʼArchitecture de Paris/Belleville (F),
22.03–5.04
Fabrice Gygi, Magasin 3, Stockholm (S), 11.02–28.05
2005 Fabrice Gygi | The aesthetics of control, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (USA),
29.10.2005–22.01.2006
Fabrice Gygi, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, St.Gallen (CH), 03.09–20.11
Fabrice Gygi, Villa Merkel, Galerien der Stadt Esslingen am Neckar (D), 20.02–17.04
Caillebotis, Pylônes, Thorax, Y..., Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris (F), 29.01–26.03
Tribunal, Château de Châteaudun (F)
2004 Linogravures 2002-2004, Hard Hat, Geneva (CH), 17.12.2004–19.02.2005
Mutual Agreement, Muse´e dʼart moderne et contemporain (Mamco), Geneva (CH), 16.10.2004–16.01.2005
Fabrice Gygi, organized by Art for the World, Geneva, Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Visual Arts Gallery, New Delhi,
India Habitat Centre, New Delhi (IND), 27.02–[?]
2003 Happiness Overdose, Centre PasquArt, Biel (CH), 06.06–03.08
Fabrice Gygi, Bob van Orsouw Gallery, Zurich (CH), 16.05–12.07
2002 Crossblock, SchauFenster von der Stiftung DKM, Duisburg (D), 14.10.2002–06.01.2003
Fabrice Gygi, Art & Public, Geneva (CH), 12.09–12.10
25th Sa˜o Paulo Biennial (BR), 23.03–02.06
Dernie`res images, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris (F), 09.02–13.04
2001 Self–Tattoos – Estampes et multiples 1982-2001, an exhibition at the Cabinet des estampes at the Muse´e
dʼart moderne et contemporain (Mamco), Geneva (CH), 03.11.2001–06.01.2002
Vide´othe`que Mobile, Art Unlimited, Art 32 Basel, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Basel (CH), 13–18.06
Fabrice Gygi, Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art, New York (USA), 31.05–18.08
Me´gahertz, installation in front of Attitudes – Espace dʼArts Contemporains, Geneva (CH), 12.05–12.07
Fabrice Gygi, Centre dʼEdition Contemporaine, Geneva (CH), 03.05–23.06
Fabrice Gygi, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris (F), 10.03–28.04
2000 Fabrice Gygi, Bob van Orsouw Gallery, Zurich (CH), 06.10–18.11
Fabrice Gygi, Le Magasin, Centre National dʻArt Contemporain, Grenoble (F), 28.05–10.09
Free Market, Espace des Arts, Chalon–sur–Saône (F), 08–09.04 (in the context of the exhibition Xn00)
Fabrice Gygi, De Lege Ruimte Gallery, Gent (B), 01.04–13.05
A propos de “Sce`ne”, with Sydney Stucki, ARCO, Chantal Crousel Gallery, Madrid (E), 09–15.02
Fabrice Gygi: de´fense, lʼelac, Lausanne (CH), 26.01–04.03
Fabrice Gygi is represented by galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris and galerie Guy Bärtschi, Geneva