This week in Zurich, Melodie Mousset's new works at Barbara Seiler gallery go under your skin – or her skin, or whose skin?
The solo exhibition of Zurich-based French artist Melodie Mousset (born 1981 in Abu Dhabi) at Barbara Seiler gallery might make you itch. A large patch of thick fake skin effetely bending over construction site scaffolding serves you as screen. A stream of consciousness-style sequence from Melodie’s world tour with and towards Melodie’s own inner organs – now cast in marble and handsomely shelved along the gallery walls –, this new video wants to be watched with your eyes simultaneously exploring the skin (modeled after Melodie’s own skin). Large framed medical photograms shed more light onto and further into the psycho-somatic realm of organ ownership, identity puzzling, and spiritual accountability. Large lumps of fake skin with lips loiter around on the floor, evacuated, exhausted, sluggish. And yet organicity is part and parcel of “organization” too. Melodie’s own internality turned outwards is always also exemplary, the social plasticity of us, that is always also systemic. Quite like the Zurich street lights that illuminate the gallery and supplement the metal scaffolding and shelving by also shedding doubt on the dogma of seeing is believing. In Melodie’s own words:
I wish I could hook my organs up to a mouth.
They would speak for themselves.
Itching is believing.
Barbara Seiler Galerie
Melodie Mousset
THERE IT SHOULD BE LIKE IT IS, GOING INSIDE LIKE HERE
13 May – 04 June, 2016
Opening: Today, Thursday, May 12, 6–8pm
A good preparation:
Lecture by Mark von Schlegell at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
Today, Thursday, May 12, 6pm
Toni-Areal Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 3.Floor, Raum 3.E08
"Von Schlegell's activist literary theory fictionalizes discourse at the expense of philosophy, history and other transatlantic delusions of the Enlightenment. His science fiction novels speculate out past the dying Earth and into the post-human settling of System Space. Von Schlegell has directed the Pure Fiction Seminar at Frankfurt's Staedeschule since 2012. He has collaborated with artists on numerous films, including Ben Rivers' Slow Action, and Frances Scholz's Amboy (2016)."
A good alternative:
The Most Beautiful Swiss Books of the year 2015
Today, Thursday, May 12, from 6pm til late
Helmhaus, Limmatquai 31, 8001 Zürich
"The Most Beautiful Swiss Books of 2015 will be on display to the public at the Helmhaus Zurich from 12 to 16 May 2016. The catalogue of this year’s competition will be published at the same time. The winner of the Jan Tschichold Award will be honoured at the vernissage. Further events at the weekend will examine key issues related to the subject of books."