Sarah Zürcher: hallucinating worlds of paradoxes a dystopia?

“It does not suffice to change the world. we do that anyway. and to a large extent that happens even without our involvement. in addition we have to interpret this change. precisely because to change it. that therefore the world does not change without us. and ultimately into a world without us.”
Günther Anders · outdatedness of human beings 2

I start my presentation with John Berger’s “ways of seeing” and “fellow prisoners” to look at art history and understand our world of images and how images function in the xxist century.

The approach is to understand how western societies function and how the paradoxes nurture more than ever neoliberal societies and how “post-truth politics” embody virtual hopes, fake beliefs and new walls (virtual and real walls). the world has become an ocean or a desert to be capitalized, but are real values disappearing? are we all imprisoned in a system? are we facing a frightening society, a dystopia?

Nowadays, our competitive societies are encouraging a multitasking individual through technology.

To portray this, Byung-Chul Han interprets the personality disorders as a social malaise. he says „we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform. stress and exhaustion are a historical phenomena where the individual is performing, becoming himself a product, unable to relate to the other“

My other focus is to develop some pre-human commons through strong archetypes – the desert and the labyrinth/maze in our cultures (literature, film, visual arts) to give a hint to poetically apprehend social, ecological and economical questions.

Sarah Zürcher (November, 2017)

Sarah Zürcher is an independent curator, art writer and documentarian and works as editor for the Sharjah art foundation 2018. Since 2008 she has organized some exhibitions and festivals around the globe – London, Cairo, Delhi, São Paulo, Algiers, Paris, marseille, Tallinn, Basel, Nairs, Lausanne and Baden. From 2014 till 2016, she worked as director of museum langmatt (ch) and from 2009 to the end of 2013 as director of the art school esba talm in tours (f). from 2002 to the end of 2007, she directed fri-art, the Fribourg Contemporary Art center. she has worked in particular at the Kunsthalle in Bern, mamco and the cabinet des estampes (print room) in geneva. For the cities of Baden and Zurich, she has worked on a number of projects in public space including the “infolge kunstprojekt”. She has regularly published articles and essays on contemporary art since the 1990s. among others, she has also edited catalogues, notably for the 9th biennial of the image in movement in 2001. She is an aica and ICOM member.
www.sarahzurcher.com