June 12, to October 27, 2023

With works by 
Bruce Nauman,
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press,
Mitchell Anderson,
Nicole Bachmann,
Sam Porritt,
Vittorio Santoro and
Marlene McCarty.

Siren Songs / Sinister Sirens is an exhibition that explores language and how language impacts us in resounding, counterintuitive and unruly ways. The potential of language to incite a sense of agency, be it explicit or implicit, is a force to be reckoned with. The exhibition brings together seven positions who through the use of language, be it textually, sculpturally, bodily or symbolically engage with topics inherently and strongly connected to agency such as action, power, ethics, social constructs and morality.

In the title Siren Songs / Sinister Sirens the dual meaning of "siren" is evocative and conjures a sense of the unexpected: a siren as a mythological being with a seductive voice and an alarm siren that connotes warning. The title with its play on words beats the drum for language and tunes in to its potential of ambiguity and subversion. 

Last Tango is a Kunstverein in Zurich dedicated to presenting and (co-) producing original exhibitions by a trans-generational roster of artists. It has since its inception been curated and run by Arianna Gellini and Linda Jensen.

Last Tango explains: "Our mission is to support artists in pursuing ambitious and stimulating presentations of their work. We seek to provide a dynamic program of exhibitions and events with unanticipated combinations of practices, new perspectives, critical reflection and dedicated outreach. Our aim is to encourage and support new forms of knowledge production, be it through exhibitions, artist talks, film screenings or tours for students."

Events

Opening
Thursday June 15th 2023, 6 to 9 pm

Several of the artists will be present.                              

Artist Walk with Mitchell Anderson and Sam Porritt   
Wednesday August 23rd 2023, 12 pm

Artist Walk with Nicole Bachmann and Vittorio Santoro
Monday October 23rd 2023, 12 pm

Guided Tours with Curators Arianna Gellini and Linda Jensen
Wednesday June 21st 2023, 12 pm
Wednesday October 25th 2023, 12 pm

All tours are in English.
Following all tours, lunch will be available for purchase at the in-house bistro.
Registration requested: isabelle.guggenheim@baloise.com

Opening Hours
Monday to Friday, 8 am to 6 pm

Födinger is a sculptor whose site-specific sculptures do not try to hide their production process. His spatial structures, mostly made of simple building materials, visualize the fundamental forces at work in the production and stabilization of three-dimensional bodies. Statics and movement, carrying and loads, diagonal and horizontal, mass and emptiness are the tension-filled poles of his sculptures, which are situated between architecture and sculpture.  

In the work he conceived for his exhibition 'Struttin' (Struttin) at the Kunstforum Baloise, Födinger remains true to his site-specific approach. In addition to several photographic works that vary the exhibition theme, a newly created sculpture establishes a relationship to the renovation work at the Basel headquarters and the formal language of the entrance hall. For his powerful work, Födinger uses simple building materials such as steel girders, metal grating, plaster, and here too he creates a paradoxical, tension-filled spatial structure.

The French artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (born 1977), who was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2015, created a series of large-format colour photographs for his exhibition at the Kunstforum Baloise at the end of last year. The series was created in French Guyana, an overseas department on the north-east coast of South America, where the artist spent his childhood. The title of the series - Vieux-Wacapou - refers to a place on the Maroni River, which was the destination of Abonnc's last year's journey inland. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, immigrants from the English-speaking Santa Lucia and the neighbouring francophone Antilles islands had settled in this place surrounded by jungle. Most of the settlers were descendants of people from Africa, who had done slave labour on the Antilles since the 17th century. Over the decades, Wacapou developed into a prosperous town that made its living from gold panning. In the mid-1980s, the artist's mother decided to buy the house of Joseph Bernes, a former money launderer, in this hamlet. The wooden house, surrounded by a small vegetable garden, was to be the only property Abonnec's mother ever owned. However, a post-colonial civil war that broke out in neighbouring Surinam in the summer of 1986 thwarted her plan to live temporarily with her family in Wacapou. It now proved to be dangerous to stay in this border town. More than thirty years elapsed between the war in Surinam and Abonnc's decision to travel to Wacapou. The photo series Vieux-Wacapou documents the artist's search for the place he knew as a child. Today the remains of the abandoned settlement lie buried under a dense layer of vegetation.
Abonnenc therefore had to proceed like an archaeologist to find the jungle
to wring his secrets from him. His photographs of the settlement remains
of Wacapou hold a rich and complex amalgam of European
colonial history, contemporary history and family history. At the same time
Abonnenc face up to the history of the house in its engagement with
his mother questions that go beyond the immediate cause.
He says, "The questions I deal with
prove to be productive: Who owns this land? From whom
did they get it? Where is their house? These three narrative strands determine
the reading of the places I want to go to try
to give pictorial form to the fragile memory of the house."
(M.K.Abonnenc, Maraudeur, 2017).
Martin Schwander

Since 1999, the Baloise Group has awarded the Baloise Art Prize to two young artists. The prize, which is endowed with 30,000 Swiss francs each, is awarded annually at Art Basel by an international jury. In addition, Baloise acquires works of art by both prizewinners and donates them to two major European museums. In 2013, the Baloise Art Prize was awarded to German artist Jenni Tischer (born 1979) and South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere (born 1984).

In its report on the works of Wa Lehulere, who is now one of the most important representatives of the younger generation of artists in South Africa, the jury emphasises the following: "In his works, Kemang Wa Lehulere deals with issues of collective memory and the historical search for traces in South Africa. The question of uncovering, writing down, but at the same time erasing text and image is the focus of his interest. The result is wall-filling drawings, installations, performances and photographs in which he combines the trauma and myths of South Africa's past with contemporary social issues. His works are to be understood as archives that show the process of forgetting and at the same time enable new and ambiguous narratives in the manner of collages.

In a conversation with the author, Wa Lehulere describes his multifaceted artistic practice as follows: "To incorporate text into my work offered me the opportunity to bundle different thought processes into a flow of energy. I developed a genuine interest in writing and also in fictional literature and short stories. Then I started to think about how I could integrate these works into different media I worked with. For example, I began writing performance scripts and documenting performances in text form without capturing them visually - purely through a written account of the experience. (...) The figures I design usually do not bear the traits of a particular gender or ethnicity, so they become a collective. I try to resist identity traits, but I am also very careful in my statements on such subjects, as I do not want to get involved in identity politics."

The works on paper exhibited at Kunstforum Baloise are strongly influenced by Wa Lehuler's experiences in the performative arts.

His ink drawings are both tension-filled movement notations and diary-like storyboards.

Martin Schwander

Berlin-based artist Susanne Kriemann has created heliogravures of plants and herbs for her exhibition at the Kunstforum Baloise. These are depictions that combine an artistic and a scientific approach. Field research led the artist to the region around Schlema (Erzgebirge), where the GDR mined the highly radioactive mineral pitchblende (uraninite) from 1946 to 1991 and thus contributed significantly to the nuclear armament of the USSR. In a large-scale renaturation programme, the landscape is to be restored by 2045.

Based on the phenomenon of the invisibility of radioactivity, Kriemann photographed herbs and flowers growing on the site, thus documenting a section of the landscape at a specific point in time of its renaturation process. These photographs form the basis for the heliogravures, a photographic printing process used especially in the late 19th century. The elaborate intaglio printing process enables a very fine gradation of colour values and represents a peculiar combination of handcrafted printing technique and photographic reproduction process. In Kriemann's work, this combination gives rise to images of enchanted places from a transfigured past, although the photographs used as printing templates were taken in the present day. Kriemann heightens the ambivalence of her image construction by inking the printing plates with the uranium-containing pigments of the herbs and plants depicted in the individual images. Kriemann's "Flowers of Evil" (title of the volume of poetry by Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1857) thus refers to the ambivalent relationship between man and nature.  

Martin Schwander

Luke Fowler (born 1978) is a filmmaker, photographic artist and musician who lives and works in Glasgow. In his film work he explores the conventions and boundaries of biographical and documentary genres. Fowler works preferably with material from film and sound archives. These finds form the basis for portraits of fascinating, often dazzling personalities from alternative culture, such as the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and the English composer Cornelius Cardew. Against the background of these remarks, it is not surprising that Fowler's film oeuvre has repeatedly been related to British Free Cinema of the 1950s.