Valentina Pini – Snake Oil / Roscha A. Säidow – Zürcher Olymp

Das Dienstgebäude eröffnet die Herbstsaison mit einer Einzelausstellung der Tessiner Künstlerin Valentina Pini.

Valentina Pini wird nach ihrem Stipendienaufenthalt von Pro Helvetia in Johannesburg neue Arbeiten zeigen. “Snake Oil” greift das Thema der Wahrsagerei und der Zauberei auf und wird eine neue animierte Videoarbeit, Fotografie sowie eine Audioarbeit zeigen. Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung erscheint eine neue Kunstedition. Zudem ist ein Text von Simon Würsten Marin publiziert:

In South Africa, if you are suffering from illness or facing problems that you feel powerless to overcome by yourself, people will likely orient you towards a Sangoma. In order to diagnose the causes of your ailment, this respected healer will usually perform a ritual consisting in throwing bones as a way to reach out to the spirit world and ask advice, before recommending you an appropriate muti — a traditional medicine based on plants, animal or mineral extracts — that will appease your ancestors and eventually cure you. In the world of the Sangomas, the empirical and the spiritual are no contradictory forces; the components of the treatments are selected for their chemical properties just as much as they are for their anagogic power. Similarly, the bones used by the healer to access the wisdom of the ancestors are subsuming their own ontological materiality into a transcendental energy that allows them to become carriers of inaudible voices and occult meaning. This sacred set of fetishes is proper to each Sangoma and may in fact not consist exclusively of actual bones, but also of tokens such as shells, stones, coins, dominos, dices and whatnot. Each of these objects is endowed with a distinct significance which, in configuration with the position of the other thrown “bones,” will allow the healer to interpret otherworldly messages. In other words, in traditional South African metaphysics — like in countless non-Western cultures —, the dialectic of the visible and the invisible is characterized, not by a fundamental schism between these two realms, but by a spiritual bridge that connects them and upon which the meaning of reality is built. Over the course of Western history, our essentialist tradition has misled us into frequently confusing form with matter, consequently wrongly interpreting the appearance of things as their fundamental nature. And so, the day you consult a Sangoma and look at the thrown objects laying on the ground, remember that these things you see are not merely what they appear to be. What you recognise as a few bones, perhaps a vertebra, a couple of shells and, say, a domino or a coin, bear a completely different meaning for the eye that looks at them from another perspective than your own. And these bones, which are not really bones, will all at once become not only a passageway to an invisible reality, but also the very eyes of these otherworldly spirits, looking at you look at them, thus simultaneously blurring the very boundary between the perceptible and imperceptible.

Wir danken für die Unterstützung dieser Ausstellung: Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim Stiftung und Curt Burgauer Stiftung

Roscha A. Säidow – Zürcher Olymp

Im zweiten Raum wird Roscha A. Säidow eine installative und performative Arbeit zeigen, die während ihrem Atelieraufenthalt bei uns im Dienstgebäude entstanden ist. Ihr zweimonatiges Stipendium hier in Zürich wurde von “Index, Wort und Wirkung”, organisiert. Sie ist bereits die achte Stipendiatin, die einen zweimonatigen Atelieraufenthalt hier in Zürich geniessen kann.

Öffnungszeiten Fr/Sa 14 – 18 Uhr, und nach Verabredung

www.dienstgebaeude.ch
www.wortundwirkung.ch

Location:
Dienstgebäude
Töpferstrasse 26
8045 Zürich
Switzerland