Hannah Villiger : Skin Processes

Hannah Villiger : Skin Processes

Online Viewing Room
Opening

Jun 12, 2022 11:00 AM

Closing

Jun 12, 2022 12:00 PM

Location

Last Tango

Sihlquai 274

8005 Zürich

Mitwirkende Künstler
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Talk by Aïcha Revellat
12.06.22 at 11:00

Art historian and PhD candidate Aïcha Revellat will trace Hannah Villiger's artistic trajectory with a focus on skin as a sculptural material. The surface of skin, be it fragmented or torn, will be explored through Villiger's drawings, collages, photographs, and other objects dating back to the early 1970s.

The skin is the membrane that separates us from the external world. It protects the inner parts of the body from the environment, and it holds it together. At the same time, skin is a porous organ, absorbing impacts from the outside as much as bringing to the surface and thus making visible what goes on inside of us. In the last decades, much attention has been paid to the body as the center for questions about categories of experience and social inequalities. Focusing on the most visible part of the human being– the skin surface– sheds light on its functions as both a boundary and a point of connection that is central to subjectivity processes.

Skin is one of many types of surfaces that make up Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre. While her own skin dominates a large portion of the enlarged polaroid photographs of the 1980s and 1990s, her interest in surfaces as torn, fragmented envelopes (or coverings) started much earlier. A look into the artists archive reveals drawings, collages, photographs, and other objects dating back to the early 1970s. Here we see investigations of the natural world and the artists immediate surroundings. Plant leaves, trees and everyday objects like clothes and packs of cigarettes tell stories about touching and being touched, skinning and concealing, crossing borders, and forming relationships. But the surfaces always remain fragmented, and what at first glance may appear to form a coherent body turns out to be a trick one’s own perception– conditioned to see a whole where there’s not– plays on us.

With kind thanks to THE ESTATE OF HANNAH VILLIGER

Aïcha Revellat
Aïcha Revellat studied English Literature and Linguistics (BA) and Art History and Image Theory (MA) at the University of Basel. In 2017 she was research assistant at the Aargauer Kunsthaus (Aarau). Since 2014 art educator at the Schaulager (Münchenstein) and the Kunstmuseum Basel. Since 2021 member of the eikones– Center for the Theory and Graduate School. Her dissertation represents the first substantial academic discussion of Hannah Villiger’s (1951-1997) work. The current hypothesis for the project is based on the idea of the everyday as being fundamental for Villiger's oeuvre, whether it is in the artists dealings with materials, media or temporal progressions

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