ASPETTI DI UNA COLLEZIONE PRIVATA / ASPECTS OF A PRIVATE COLLECTION
Katia Bassanini, Alex Hanimann, Elke Krystufek, Shahryar Nashat

22nd July – 17th September 2006 
Fri-Sat-Sun 14:00-18:00 (or by appointment)

The works of art, which come from a private collection, offer a cross-section of the Swiss art production over the last 10-15 years with a particular reference to the programmatic choices of CACT. The Swiss American artist, Katia Bassanini (1969) is amongst the authors who are gaining their recognition, and her works on paper with some art objects are being exhibited. This artist, as well as for her artistic course out of our borders, she is known to the public for having won – amongst the others – the prize as the best young in the thematic exposition What’s new?, held in 2003 at the Canton Art Museum of Lugano. Getting from the performing aspects historically referable to the schools animated by Nitsch, Schwarzkogler and Brus, K. B. manages to become herself mediation, using many means of production, like drawing, painting, videos and art objects. […] Like in the typically Italian tradition of comedy of art, also in the universe pitilessly outlined by the artist the individuals are nothing but grotesque masks, stereotype images. […] […] Outlining this world the artist does not feel any pity for it or does not show any underground empathy, but he uses a harsh and coarse language, which rejects the hypocrisy of being politically correct. […] (from Elio Schenini).

Born in Iran and grown up in Switzerland, Shahryar Nashat (1975) is since the first years of this decade one of the protagonists on the national art stage.  Having consolidated his position abroad with the invitation to represent our country at the Biennale of Venice 2005 Edition, of this artist we show the video installation on two channels All the way back, the reconstruction, 2001. The work of art – which will represent an important turn in the career of the young artist – consists in the story of a man, who runs away from a bedroom, leaving another man to lay on a bed. The narrative elements are not given, within them we identify cause and effect, and the fact that one prevails on the other in a struggling pursue of states of mind between reality and fiction, despair and violence. The reconstruction of an unlikely bedroom and of an off-screen narrating voice drafts the purpose of the artist who recomposes fragments of memory, of a hypothetical struggle once experienced.

A selection of works on paper and some art objects represents the part dedicated to Alex Hanimann (1955). He is an artist exhibited many times at CACT and is most of all working in the German and French speaking Cantons in Switzerland. His work – even getting from the pictorial tradition – faces especially nowadays problems of communication, by means of the drawn image and the meanings of writing (as signs) linked to the media phenomenon of a world which is characterised by the excess of information. A. H. does never miss a critical meditation over the relationship technology / language, outlining a future in which the dis-materialisation and the loss of control over the concept of “time” empties the human relationship of communication.
Of Elke Krystufek (1970), some videos are presented with the titles It’s unfair (1992) e This Life can’t be an Excuse for the next One (1994).

The art exhibition is open to the public from Friday to Sunday from 14:00 to 18:00 or by appointment.



[translation: Silvia Porcedda]