NB. New York Berlin

The studios of the Confederation

Every year, two artists are awarded a residence grant by the Federal Office of Culture, and spend a year in New York and Berlin, respectively. Eric Hattan and Claudio Moser won these grants in 1996 and inaugurated a cycle of exhibitions at the CAN that the OFC has now been organising each year since then, in conjunction with three art centres, alternately : the Kunsthalle Saint-Gall, the Kunsthalle Liestal, and the CAN. If Eric Hattan operates in the familiar field of the household world, he does so the better to entrap us. This artist recreates interiors – bedroom, bathroom, corridor – into which he introduces a reversal, a discrepancy with the representation we each may have of it. Driven by a fundamental doubt about our ways of getting to know the world, he invites us to undergo the physical experience of a hiatus between our sensory perception and our intellect. When you ask Claudio Moser how he spends his days, he answers : « I wander about ». By bus, on foot, in trains, by bicycle, he photographs – blind – haunted architecture, landscapes of absence and bridges which connect void to void. With a preference for places of transit – motorways, stations, car parks, he empties them of all human presence, and avoids any drift toward the affective. This artist monitors faults, problems to do with doubt, and accidents which offer the presentiment of a passage where white turns to black, and black to white.

Marc-Olivier Wahler translated by Simon Pleasance

Opening January 24 1997
Exhibition from January 25 to March 16 1997