opening time:
17sept 2022 14-22 vernissage
18sept- 22sept 2022 14-18 23sept – 24sept 2022 14-20
25 – 30sept 14-18 other times up on request
info@theoff.space
Luegislandstrasse 105, 8051 Zürich entrance „Werkhalle“ 6 rooms on 1800m2 last exhibiton before demolition
With the Werkerei and a transformation of the whole surrounding area as a contextual basis, the group exhibition addresses the periphery and its changing image. An area lying on the outskirts of the city, that has become a home to a variety of companies, art studios and craft workshops, is now being demolished. Like a draft being erased to become a clean slate for a new image, this place disappears from the map to serve a more profitable purpose.
Peripheral urban landscapes, changing in a fast pace, embody a different time – space reality as opposed to the city center. Dynamic changes in these areas are reasoned by an absence of recognized historical value, which sadly defines them as “disposable” architectural elements. This exhibition is a reminder that value of the space can have a different nature.
Such non-central spaces like this «periphery» often become centers of artistic production; in other cases, they become platforms of expression to voices that are often unheard. “The periphery” is often the buzzing “dark matter” that makes it possible for great creations to come to light.
The artists address space historically and/or site-specifically, among other things. They question the notion of “space” and the demarcation between inside and outside. The works challenge social and physical distance, closeness and intimacy. But just as directly and astutely, an appeal is made to socio-political peripheries, to the margins, in all meanings of this word, from the territorial borders to the physical “shell” of what we perceive as body, and, finally, to its connotation with the vocabulary of finance and profit.
«Last words from the periphery II» promises a sensitive exploration of the points of contact between spaces, things or beings. As well as the confrontational visualisation of the offside, the being-in and/or out in the abyss of the state.
«theoff.space» will have a break after this exhibition to find a new place here or there somehow it could be anywhere!
Olga Antonova (*1988) Contact Instagram Artsy She lived and worked for a long time in Kyiv. From 2016 till 2018 was a part of an art collective Art-Group Light. Since 2018 she is focusing on her personal artistic practice. Olga was a nominee at Koschatzky Art-Award 2021. Currently she is doing a Master degree in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts (graduating in 2022). Her works are talking about loneliness, as a complex structure that consists of different feelings and emotions. She is trying to interweave the subtle, usually hidden, but sometimes overwhelming feeling of loneliness with the technical approach of classical mediums that she uses. Drawing is her primary medium, she approaches every other medium that she uses as if it were drawings. Now she am concentrating more on sculptures, graphics on paper and audio.
Tiziano Autera Contact Instagram Homepage Artsy Tiziano Autera studies his environment intensively. In this confrontation, he grasps influential perspectives for him, wich he fundamentally and skillfully redesigns. New characters he perceives in society flow into his creative process, creating unimagined figurations through shifts in gestures and facial expressions. The artist sensually proportions human physiology in such a way that his human images repeatedly reflect their unique countenance. Through his cubist approaches female and male body features diffuse to a harmonious existence and lovely commonality. His interpretations of human individuality are characterized by colors and patterns wich show our different realities.
Marc Busse (* 1990) Instagram Contact Artsy Marc Busse deals with reality and perception. The artist combines visible and tactile elements on canvas and puts the material and purpose of these elements into play. Busse works with various elements from tactile floor guidance systems (ribs, grooves or knobs) that enable people visual impairments to orientate themselves within public spaces and alert them to dangers. These floor guidance systems, as well as the practices of floor and marking colours used in barrier-free planning and building construction, are the starting point for Busse’s “Floor Paintings”. In doing so, Busse changes the context of the control systems, but not their precise function. Everyday orientation aids become compositions where the materials and functions of these items create a visual dialogue within the picture. If we now look at this picture as the observer, our awareness experiences the same confusion that optical illusions trigger. In the moment, knowing that we are unclear, we ask ourselves what is real now. This shows us that multiple versions of reality can coexist with no hierarchy. Busse carefully points out this fleeting moment of self-awareness by means of tactile language for the visually impaired. Text: Jordis Fellfrau Since experimenting with painting, it was important for me dat the work justifies it self. My practice with the materials is always to use them as instructed by the producer. In the case of the floor paintings i use material that is installed on the floor. 2013 i started ripping out the first guiding studs from the floor in Hong Kong so i could show the people what i was looking for. So after dat i started collecting the tactile ground surace indicators (TGSI) from all the city’s: Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, USA and Europe. They come in so many different materials and shapes and still all share the same function. The “floor paintings” work in some how like floor examples (floor samples). Mabey a situation dat could be installed but mostly functions only as a painting or idea. And is presented vertical like you would see it in a carpet store or in a presentation for an architectural project. I like the conflict between situation and cause of the situation. Like with FP73 where i have the scintillating grid illusion and replacing the white dots with the tactile ground studs.
Victoria Cheredeeva: Homepage Contact Instagram Victoria Cheredeeva is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Zurich. Some themes in her work include the riddle as a medium, music, which often acts as a guide, and surprise. Across mediums, her work is characterized by improvisation, experimentation, and immediacy.
Naiwen Chou Homepage Contact Instagram Naiwen Chou(b. 1994, Taipei, Taiwan) In my artistic practice, I work with themes and questions concerning value, record, time and memory. I have been working and living in Japan and Switzerland since 2014.
Rocco A. de Filippo Homepage Contact Instagram Artsy Rocco de Filippo makes drawings and paintings. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, the artist often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations. “The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces,” as Hanna Arendt quotes Franz Kafka. The artist searches for (inter-)faces, like in psychology, where humans recognize faces faster and better than other patterns, or see them even in non-human objects, or, for the child, the face is a partial object of desire. His drawings do not reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted, and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation. His works never show the complete structure. As a result, the artist can easily imagine interpretations of reality that are not necessarily predetermined by historical facts. By applying abstraction not as an analytical tool but rather following the flow of the unconscious and intuition, he creates intense personal moments by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles.
Simeon Droulers Instagram Siméon Droulers, born 1996 in Paris, France, lives and works between Brussels and Paris. After training in ceramics in high school, Droulers went on to study painting at the School of Fine Arts in Limoges. He pursued graduate studies at the École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels, where he incorporated performance and installation work into his painterly practice. Siméon Droulers' references are largely to the daily interactions of urban life, especially those of the diverse, northeastern neighborhoods of Paris where he grew up. More recently, he has introduced cooking and cuisine into his work, experimenting with new mixtures of color, flavor, and texture. By bringing painting and cooking together he remakes the exhibition space into place for conviviality and sharing. Included in this show are two paintings. The first, Café Stella 11h, is an attempt to transcribe all the energies intersecting at 114 rue de Belleville in Paris. The second painting regards the relationship Droulers is developing between painting and cooking; it is titled: 1,2,3 Mimosa, 4 hard-boiled eggs, Mayonnaise, Lemon juice, Pepper, Salt, 4 anchovies, Capers, Basil.
Simon Epp: Homepage Contact Instagram Artsy The experimental and processual exploration of the combinations of colours, structures, surfaces and materials opens up the painterly approach to his work. The paintings and series of works that emerge from the step-by-step process of creation draw their power from the immediacy and spontaneity of creation. Thus geometric proportionalities, patterns and forms often form recognisable basic elements which, precisely because of their deliberately imprecise, hand-guided and irregular execution, develop a surprising effect and multi-layered visual quality in their imperfection and variability. Repetition and reproduction give rise to free, print-like and sculptural colour compositions. The empirical search for the tense relationship between abstraction, aesthetic composition and multi-layered associativity, which is palpable in the works and sometimes seems almost manic, has a contagious, personal and demanding effect.
Sève Favre Instagram In her artworks, Sève Favre concentrates on transcending the classical boundary between the work and the viewer. The main feature of her art is interactivity. The key words that support her concept is being interaction (be together), variation (be different), activity (be active). Her name for this experience is « intervariactivity ». She wants to integrate the viewer into her art in a direct and tactile way. Sève Favre combines this experience with a strong digital (virtual) focus and physical (real) way, through works on canvas, in situ installations, performances, happening or digital works and projects. Her interactive artworks engages the public in the artistic process in order to have an impact on their way of thinking about art and concepts. Her aim is to generate a flow of experiences, interactions and relationships with the public that is multimedias and multidirectional. For this exhibiltion, Sève Favre presents a site-specific installation on the theme of water. She wishes to question the spectator on his with this vital element. Today, water, which is a natural good, becomes money through the economic process. This fact enters today in competition with the effects of the climatic change and our polutions, making more urgent the problems induced by our management of this necessary heritage to all lives. "Captation" is an interactive installation that questions our connection to water and its value. Water reflects not only our image but also the way we interact with it and therefore the way we take care of it. Will we be able to limit ourselves, to adopt a citizen and participative responsibility in order to manage this precious liquid or on the contrary will we choose an attitude of egoistic capture?
Marcelot Homepage Instagram Marcelot is the artist’s name of Marcelo Tomaz Galvão de Castro, born 1965 in Potim, Guaratinguetá, Brazil. The artist discovered his artistic talent early on. In his homeland he already studied art education in Pindamonhangaba (1987-1989), with a focus on theater. As a teacher he worked in different schools. Active in Europe since 1990, he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1991-1997), Germany. Here he was able to find his artistic identity, and continue to develop it. In the time of his training fall numerous exhibitions that show him as a sensitive observer of the world and creative deformer of the supposedly well-known. Above all, the artist works with pre-ideas of objects and their symbolic value. His work shows a wide range; he gets his inspiration from books, conversations with friends or colleagues, music, poetry, media, etc., which he realizes in „projects“. Two of them have met with a great response from the public and the press. After studying art, he made a postgraduate in art therapy in the same institute (1997-1999). Thus, he studied in separate stages the three level of art: the educational level, the artistic level and the therapeutic level. After completing his studies, in 2002 he accepted an invitation to work as an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in Münsterlingen, Switzerland. The following time is marked by immersion in the human psyche. He also completed a training as a group analyst in the SGAZ (Seminar for group analysis Zurich – 2003-2007). He did not exhibit much during this phase. Since 2009 active as a freelance artist, matured, the artist is practicing art again. 2015 he got the Swiss citizenship. He completed successfully his first artist-in-residence in the FAAP (Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado – Oct. to Dec. 2018) in São Paulo, Brazil.
Alice Gilardi (*1992, Zürich): Contact Instagram Alice Gilardi creates mixed media artworks by collecting and assembling fragments, objects, and leftovers from her everyday life. She calls it a contemporary, “superficial”, research & collecting practice. Born and raised in a bilingual context, language, translations, and cultural aspects are crucial for understanding and framing of her works. Alice explores themes including contraries or counter-posed and coexisting realities. She is most interested in the moment when opposites meet and melt together. Sometimes it’s about absurdities that make her think about a situation. Often it’s also about the mere visual or sound aesthetic. She believes that also something apparently insignificant, frivolous, or mundane, like a drifted boat fender, a snippet of a conversation or even one simple word, has connotations, can tell a story, or trigger emotions. Assembled pieces can lead to a broader context, create new realities, or fortify their inherent narratives. What is the inherent content of an object? What are the contexts? Where is the friction? She’s very eager on achieving an immaculate state, which always includes its opposite; Like the English garden, an idealised image of nature in which one lets grow what is growing, but is very curated and thus far from natural. In a context where every argument finds its approval and where it could seem difficult to find a truth, the artist might suggest an opinion, but instead of validating a statement or to give an answer, she likes to leave the space open for one’s own perspectives and thoughts
Luca Harlacher Homepage Contact Instagram Luca Harlacher's artistic work is about the sensory overload, the complexity and chaos in our inner and outer life in times of globalization and hybridization. But he does not want to fall into cultural pessimism but to show that the coexistence of heterogeneous elements, the simultaneity of non-simultaneities, "micro-macro shifts" and the omnipresent combination of countless contrasts is not a burden but can be fun.
Nic Hess Homepage Nic Hess’ Arbeiten entstehen direkt auf der Wand: Mittels. Klebestreifen und Folien zieht der Künstler Linien, die sich stellenweise verdichten oder über ganze Räume ausdehnen.
Alina Kopytsa (*1983, Ukraine) Homepage Contact Instagram Kopytsa received her diploma in graphic arts from the National Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (2000-2006). She has been studying fine arts at Zurich University of the Arts since 2017. Gender relations, sexual behavior, and fetishism are the subjects of Alina Koptytsa’s textile colages, sculptures, and performances. Since 2011 she has participated in major international and personal artistic projects such as Twinning, Kulturgolger, Zurich, Switzerland; Intertwining, Dienstgebaude, Zurich, Switzerland; Play. Pause. Stop, The Naked Room, Kyiv, Ukraine; Biennale Ve věci umění / Matter of Art 2020 (VVUMOA) Prague; A Space of One’s Own, PinchukArtCentre Kyiv.
Martina Morger Homepage Instagram Contact Artsy Martina Morger's artistic practice interweaves cybernetics and corporeality in situational installations and site-specific performances. Her central questions deal with individual freedom in increasingly technological lifeworlds as well as ideas of power, desire and care within a neoliberal society determined by work and performance. Through a hydrofeminist approach she repeatedly places a specific focus on the role of FLINTA and constructions of gender. Her works can be understood on the one hand as positionings within the existing system and on the other hand as assertions against that very system: Martina actively occupies spaces, politicises the human body and negotiates the effects of social constraints on our bodies through strategies of display and visualisation. In this way, she creates queer drafts of a society whose central characteristics are hybridity and fluidity and thus assert themselves against the standardisation efforts of our present.
Victorine Müller: Homepage Contact Instagram “Das traumwandlerische Überschreiten von Grenzen, das Eintauchen in andere Gedankenwelten, das Erkunden potentieller Realitäten, Leichtigkeit und Durchlässigkeit sowie atmosphärische Irrealität sind Wesensmerkmale von Victorine Müllers künstlerischem Schaffen. Scheinbar aktiv an einem sonderbaren Transformationsprozess teilhabend erscheinen ihre Werke als Phantasma, als Traumgebilde, dessen Geheimnis durch keinen noch so verstiegenen Deutungsversuch gelüftet werden kann – und es ist gerade dieses alle Inszenierungen von Victorine Müller durchdringende Mysterium, das anhaltend fesselt.” Gabrielle Obrist
Andrea Muniain (Tudela, 1994) lives and works in Madrid Homepage Contact Instagram Andrea Muniáin is a multidisciplinary architect and artist whose practice focuses on the relationships between digitality and corporality. Currently, Andrea’s work explores the political component of the digital representation of bodies. Both as an artist and in her more academic work, Andrea criticises the current aesthetic regime, analysing how digital visualisation practices tend towards the standardisation of a universal body. This critique aims to highlight the need to find a new universal body representation, not anchored in the constitutive visual practices of the current hegemonic regime. Her work has been shown in different cultural institutions, architecture studios and universities, including La Casa Encendida, Matadero, Takk architecture, UTS Sydney, ELISAVA. A small stain on the quilt, a slightly unstitched towel, worn curtains, a forgotten tie, a lost belt. All this is evidence of an absent body. These are the elements of the only evidence of what was. It is only in the failure of the objects that remain in the room that the presence of the previous person can be intuited.
Katerina Sedy, lives and works in Zürich Homepage Contact Instagram Katerina grew up in communist Czechoslovakia and the prefabricated, also brutalist buildings and urban planning there, have shaped her to this day. The quality of an environment affects human well-being. It is also said to have a healing effect. The changes that she perceives in her living environment, but also outside, often affects her as if the decision-makers were not thinking about the well-being of the population. This changes happens primarily under understandable reasons and even if she takes into account all factors, it does not cancel out the reality of the users, who may have to take the environment for decades. The fact that this topic affects me in my immediate environment encourages me to deal with the changes in residential areas. In my artistic practice, Katerina is not interested in what infrastructure or quality of life is shaped by shops and facilities. It is also not in her field of interest how the interior spaces are architecturally planned. On the other hand, she would like to understand what belongs to the construct of an atmosphere of the public place. Because the atmosphere is inextricably linked with the evaluation of it. She examines the various acoustic, haptic, and visual components of an atmosphere and would like to find out what makes the atmosphere positive or negative. She observes the components such as light, air, colors, sound, and surfaces in nature, in the city, in large squares such as small corners, in places with lots of greenery, but also underground rooms, etc. Wherever a place feels intense, she listen and look closely. Both topics often overlap in what triggers her. The media she uses, photography, video, painting, digital collage, installation, and sculpture are for her a kind of catalog from which she draws depending on the concept and intention. Her projects uses often symbolic components from the current focus in the field of interest.
Anita Semadeni (*1986) lives and works in Zurich. Homepage Contact Instagram Anita Semadeni is always in search of the ordinary, and removes the layers that the first glance normally doesn’t penetrate. Her work lives from cutting up and reassembling the material. The home and the immediate surroundings are central. Everything seems at first unthreatening, white and pure. The ruler disturbs the idyll, is present at the second glance, measures everything and leaves nothing unseen. Semadeni's works give room for open narratives, reflections and speculations.
Dimitrina Sevova: Homepage Contact Instagram Dimitrina Sevova, Bulgarian artist living and working in Switzerland. Her primary interest is in the different states of clay, its fragility, and how it takes concrete and embodied forms from handmade or cast ceramic or porcelain objects and vessels to sculptures of unfired clay. Like in alchemy, working with this material needs a mutual affinity in which creativity and the plasticity and resistance inherent to the material incorporate chance and process in her work. They are displayed in various re-configurations, assemblages and installations of site-specific and contextual orientation, in which the artist employs in addition various media, from found objects, photography or video to space and time informed by play, game and technological dispositives. The artist draws on scientific realism with its objective reality, which in her works is translated through imagination into the objects’ performative, subjective, and spatial states. They navigate between two systems, on the one hand, the representational models and figurative illusions and fiction, and on the other, the abstract, immaterial, invisible and performative qualities of matter and reality itself, scaling between micro and macro, capturing a mysterious manifestation of natural and technological magic in the dark underscore of poetic ecologies. Dimitrina Sevova holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts ZHdK, Zurich, a MAS Curating from the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts of ZHdK, and a Master of Fine Arts from the National Academy of Art, Sofia, in the painting class of Prof. Andrey Daniel. As a young artist in Bulgaria, despite her beginnings as a painter, she represented a new generation of artists working with new media art, video and installation art, exhibiting locally and internationally. After some years dedicated to independent curatorial practices and projects, she reclaimed her artist studio practices, with a primary focus on sculpture and installation art.
Tajda Tomšič: Instagram Artsy Tajda Tomsic is a Zurich-based artist from Slovenian. She works with a variety of mediums in her art practice. Focusing on performance, sculpture, drawing and multimedia installation. Her research touches upon topics of behavioral psychology, mental health, human relationships, cinema, gender and identity.
Gregor Vogel Homepage contact Gregor Vogel (*1993) ist Künstler aus Zürich. Seine Praxis umschliesst verschiedene Interessensbereiche wie Naturwissenschaft, digitale Medienkunst oder relational aesthetics. Er formuliert kritische Überlegungen mit Hilfe von Performances, Videos, Collagen und Skulpturen und macht diese so für ein Publikum verständlich.
Andreas Weber (*1988), lebt und arbeitet in Zürich. Contact Instagram Artsy His works are based on memories, his dreams and his imagination, which he juxtaposes with external points of view. Through painting, associations interweave, distort and overlap on the material level. Boundaries shift or dissolve visibly during the process. Given formats and spaces are intertwined and expand in the process. Pictorial elements detach themselves from the original context and are transferred into a superimposed pictorial world by means of increasingly complex compositions.