Den Atlas öffnen / Opening the Atlas
17.04.–08.05.2021

Artists in this exhibition project DEN ATLAS ÖFFNEN
Jane Ingram Allen, Santa Rosa, USA
Hannes Brunner, Berlin/Zürich
Claudia Schmid, Zürich

An atlas opens up the world and its individual parts for us – their religions, ethnographies, mountains and waterways – and, in its totality, lets us leaf through the book from cover to cover at leisure. Much alike, the artists in this exhibition open up individual parts of their own worlds, which, when put together, form a new whole, meaningful far beyond the sum of its parts.

For Jane Ingram Allen, the term opening up plays an important role. She opens the doors of the Haus zur Glocke and steps outside. There, a quilt work is created, consisting of many hand-made paper pieces, from which – assembled into a large quilt – flowers will soon sprout. Her work within the house, likewise consists of hand-made paper. During the first weeks of the Covid-19 quarantine in spring 2020, she created one roll of paper every day like a kind of diary. These are now to be unfurled by the audience – opened up – in order to read, to modify, to add one’s own thoughts to them.

For a little more than a year, Hannes Brunner has first spent time sketching every day, before activating any kind of digital devices or other forms of media. Sometimes, a seriality of pages on one single topic emerges, sometimes it is but one sheet. Each time, one of these pages finds its way onto Instagram without caring about followers but declaring an archival space in digital mass-media that conveys intimacy. In the attic of the Haus zur Glocke, these more than 365 pages are presented as an analogue viewing experience for the first time, titled Analoges Jahr – Worte finden für etwas aus der Dämmerung (analogue year – finding words for something from dawn).

Claudia Schmid’s openly applied artistic investigations are spatial explorations of areas such as electricity, light and space. Over the last few years, installations and series of images in reference to each respective spatial and thematic contexts have emerged. Now, she taps into her collection of images; an archive of digital photo series. Through repeated acts of displaying, viewing, and assigning, she forms new visual approaches and correlations. Since an atlas does not offer any shape or gaps which could be called definitive, the artist will capture individual image constellations as snapshots for the exhibition.