Jusqu’ici, tout va bien [So far, so good] – CA Werkschau 2019

Introduction

“Grannie, Gramps, what did you do in the neoliberal era?” Our grandchildren may well ask us this question in the near future, reproachingly: why did we allow the ecological catastrophe to happen? Wasn’t the outcome obvious to everyone?

In this year’s Camera Arts graduation show, the proverbial barrel is overflowing, also in the design of the exhibition, and the opening page of this publication takes up the glove. Urgent concerns are put forward publicly. Many of the projects focus on acutely impending changes, imagined or experienced, visually expressing processes of incremental insight. Some tell precise tales of potentially vanishing microcosms. The broad bandwidth of projects ranges from documentary film, website and mobile installations to the classic slow medium of the book – in concert with an exhibition that ends in gardens of insight and self-knowledge.

Here, the visitor is spiritually inspired and encouraged, as well as visually comforted, to successively cast their view towards a landscape beyond Camera Arts.

One of today’s media practices of visualization attempts at describing the world’s complexity by expanding still and moving images with a plethora of other information: words, data, sounds. This to stabilize the essentially unstable images, and validate them politically, culturally and economically. Direct interaction and users’ feedback democratize and popularize them. Counter-practices don’t start with utilization, but already with human perception: with subjectively experiencing the world. Here, the ambiguity and ambivalence of images are not a flaw, but products of the specific properties of photographic medium and of visual storytelling.

Nine visual storytelling projects on display:

How like a leaf I am by Alexandra Baumgartner
We’re too young to run in circles by Monika Jia Rui Scherer
Jerusalem Stone/ Even Yerushalmit/ Hajjar Maqdissi by Flurin Bertschinger
disillusion | revolution by Kira Barlach and Kim Jonas Meier
Port Talbot by Severin Pomsel
Of Costumes and Customs – Valais Traditions In Times of Change by Tanja Frey
Die gepflegte Frau [The Neat Woman] by Julia Brun
Nach der Roten Arbeit [After the Red Labor] by Özlem Petri
ANAR – Pomegranates Grow in Winter by Anna-Tia Buss