Join us for an evening of drinks and the presentation of four new books by Jenny Rova, Ester Vonplon, Will Stacey and Roger Eberhard. Jenny and Ester will be present to sign and talk about their publications. We look forward to welcoming you.

Will Stacey - Deadline

Jenny Rova - I would also like to be

Ester Vonplon und Stephan Eicher - Gletscherfahrt

Roger Eberhart - Martin Parr looking at books


b.frank books was founded by Zurich born photographer Roger Eberhard in 2011. The Swiss publishing house is run by Eberhard and Ester Vonplon and currently publishes four to six books a year. b.frank books’ main focus is the photographic artist’s book, presenting the work of young artists from all over the world.

b.frank books online: bfrankbooks.com

A screening and podium discussion at Kino Xenix organized and curated by Corner College.

With Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Christoph Brunner, Dimitrina Sevova, HOSPIZ DER FAULHEIT.

The film is in French with English titles. The main language of the podium discussion will be English.

Ticket for the screening: 12 Fr. Podium discussion: admission free.

Composed of eight interlinked plateaus and occupying a liminal space between documentary, fiction and essay, Facs of Life attempts to map a number of molecular trajectories of life and thought beginning from a series of encounters: with video footage of Gilles Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes (1975-76), with the woods where the university buildings once stood, with students who attended the seminar, and of the new university at St Denis, and inevitably with the phantoms of revolution, both cinematic and political, that continue to haunt collective desire.

Facs of Life has been screened at numerous film festivals, museums and art spaces worldwide.

Towards a Pedagogy of the Virtual

The virtual is not opposed to the real, Gilles Deleuze writes, but to the actual. And he further concludes with his life-time companion Félix Guattari that ‘events are the reality of the virtual.’ Thinking through the event of philosophy as a pedagogy of the virtual, a pedagogy of potentiality, guides Maglioni’s and Thomson’s detailed and poetic film.

The Swiss premiere screening will be followed by an open conversation with the artists and invited guests presented by Christoph Brunner.


Opening of the exhibition Shipwreck Study Notes (What Rises From the Depths Cannot Help But Break the Surface) by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson at Corner College, on Wednesday, 7 October, 20:00h.

Both this screening and the exhibition are kindly supported by the French Embassy in Switzerland.

An exhibition by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

Opening hours:
Wed/Fri: 16:00h - 18:30h
Thu: 16:00h - 20:00h
Sat: 15:00h - 17:00h

(See English text below.)

L’exposition se constitue à partir d’un assemblage de fragments dispersés d’un film « naufragé » (épreuves de tournage, images, sons, textes, éléments du décor et de la recherche) installés dans l’espace de Corner College. Tourné pendant une traversée de l’Atlantique sur un paquebot de Lisbonne à Sao Paolo sur des variations du roman L’Amérique de Franz Kafka, le film explore des états d’épuisement et d’effondrement sur le fond de la crise financière, dont les effets sont cachés et différés par un régime de divertissement et de consommation forcés. Pour l’exposition Shipwreck Study Notes, l’ambiance sonore dans l’espace et l’installation de certains éléments seront activées et modifiées par des micro-interventions orchestrées par les artistes pendant leur séjour à Zurich. Ces micro-interventions seront improvisées, avec la complicité du public, selon une série de suggestions mi-aléatoires (Study Notes), une performance et une action collective musicale (musicking). L’objectif est de transformer l’espace en un lieu de vie, de réflexion, de soin et de mise en accord de longueurs d’ondes fluctuantes et imprévisibles.

Commissariat: Dimitrina Sevova

Nous tenons à remercier l'Ambassade de France en Suisse de son soutien.

(Texte en français ci-dessus.)

What Rises From the Depths Cannot Help But Break the Surface is a modular installation of variable dimensions that reconfigures material related to the film Disappear One (2015) in an open, experimental environment.

The exhibition constitutes itself on the basis of an assemblage of dispersed fragments of a "shipwrecked" film (rushes, images, sounds, texts, elements of the props and research) installed in the space of Corner College. Shot during a transatlantic cruise from Lisbon to Sao Paolo on an ocean liner over variations of Franz Kafka's novel America, the film explores states of exhaustion and collapse on the backdrop of the financial crisis, whose effects are hidden lag in time due to a regime of compulsory entertainment and consumption. For the exhibition Shipwreck Study Notes, the sound environment and the installation of certain elements will be activated and modified by micro-interventions orchestrated by the artists during their stay in Zurich. These micro-interventions will be improvised, with the complicity of the audience, following a series of semi-random suggestions (Study Notes), a performance and a collective musical action (musicking). The aim is to transform the space into a place of life, reflection, care and tuning of fluctuating and unpredictable wave lengths.

The conception of different installation modules of Disappear One marks the continuation of Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson’s research into the possibilities of ‘exploded’ or dispersed forms of cinema, moving on from the various exhibitions and installations they have created with and around several films: Wolkengestalt (2007-2015), Facs of Life (2009-2015) and In Search of UIQ (2011-2015).

For the artists, the installation of a film necessary involves a formal and material mutation, a process of virtualization that reverses the actualized film into the problematic field of its making, and, one could also say, of its unmaking or undoing. This also implies a redistribution of time. Spatial montage allows this transformation of the interstitial spaces between elements into cracks in time, letting in a draught of ‘elsewhere wind’ that may loosen the viewer’s hold on their own time.

The topos of the shipwreck is a condition which envelops and permeates the filmic material, the Atlantic crossing the artists made with the UEINZZ Theatre Company and other fellow travellers, Kafka’s novel (already an abandoned fragment of a dispersed oeuvre) and the exhibition form itself - which at the formal level consists of redistributed visual, aural and textual flotsam that breaks the surface in a different configuration of elements each time the work is displayed.

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova



This exhibition is kindly supported by the French Embassy in Switzerland.


This dual film/installation project was selected and supported by the patronage committee of FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques). The film Disappear One was co-produced by Spectre, Le Fresnoy Studio National d'Arts Contemporains and Terminal Beach.

Artist talk by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

The artist talk will gradually merge into the Shipwreck Study Notes sessions (Wreckship & Musicking), and be followed by a dinner.

Shipwreck Study Notes #1 (Wreckship):
Making a life raft (‘weg von hier’)

The workshop/wreckship takes up dispersed textual fragments as materials for constructing an assemblage that may function as materials for a life raft, one whose logs do not close ranks but are loosely fastened to allow the passage of water between them, yet at the same time their ties permit the raft to ‘hold fast’. One of the aims will be to think this notion of the raft in the shadow of past, recent and ongoing catastrophes of displacement. Through the score provided by the Study Notes, the functioning of the reading group will be steered towards a more floating, poetic dynamic (including texts by Kafka, Woolf, Pessoa, Gombrowicz, Lispector, Deligny, Deleuze, Guattari, Agamben).

Shipwreck Study Notes #2 (Musicking):
Aquaosmosis

Elements of the aquatic sound environment in the exhibition space become the basis for a group improvisation using existing/invented instruments or sound-making devices provided by the participants and by Corner College. The group’s deployment of these will be guided by a number of rites chosen from the Shipwreck Study Notes. The improvisation will focus on music making as a collective, participative act or activity involving heterogeneous and not-always strictly musical means of expression, rather than as the interpretation or constitution of a musical work or object.

Dinner

This event is part of the exhibition Shipwreck Study Notes (What Rises From the Depths Cannot Help But Break the Surface) by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson.

The event and the exhibition are kindly supported by the French Embassy in Switzerland.

Ist «Krritiker!» – wie in Samuel Becketts «Warten auf Godot» – heute in der bildenden Kunst ein Schimpfwort? Was wollen wir tun, damit es keines mehr ist? Was sagen wir überhaupt damit, wenn wir uns KritikerInnen nennen? Oder wollen wir am Ende sogar, dass «Crritic!» erst zum Schimpfwort wird?

«Crritic!» ist eine sechsteilige Veranstaltungsreihe zur Kunstkritik in der Schweiz, deren erste Ausgabe im Corner College stattfindet und die dann nomadisch weiterziehen wird. Sie will KritikerInnen und LeserInnen in verschiedenen Regionen zusammenbringen und zum Austausch anregen über den Stand der Dinge im Kontext des Schreibens über Kunst. Und sie will die Bildung einer diskussionsfreudigen und tatkräftigen Gemeinschaft von in diesem Bereich Tätigen fördern.

«Crritic!» wird von Aoife Rosenmeyer und Daniel Morgenthaler – beide Schreibende (unter Anderem) – aufgegleist und betreut. Nach einem ersten Workshop mit eingeladenen Kritikerinnen und Kritikern aus verschiedenen Teilen der Schweiz im Oktober 2014 soll diese öffentliche Veranstaltungsreihe es ermöglichen, die initiierten Diskussionen aufzunehmen und daran in grösseren Gruppen weiterzudenken.

Am ersten «Crritic!»-Abend in Zürich stossen KrritikerInnen mit ganz unterschiedlichem Hintergrund die Diskussion an: Barbara Preisig und Judith Welter stellen ihr mit Pablo Müller und Lucie Kolb neu gegründetes Magazin – «Brand-New-Life Magazin für Kunstkritik» – vor, Marco De Mutiis spricht über seine Erfahrungen mit «Still Searching», dem Blog des Fotomuseums Winterthur, während Sophie Yerly über ihre Arbeit als unabhängige Bloggerin («We Find Wildness») berichtet.

«Crritic!» wurde in Zusammenarbeit mit Pro Helvetia – Schweizer Kulturstiftung entwickelt und wird unterstützt von der AICA – Association internationale des critiques d’art: Section suisse.

Christian Saehrendt liest aus seinem neuesten Buch, Gefühlige Zeiten. Die Zwanghafte Sehnsucht nach dem Echten.

Anschliessend Diskussion mit Stefan Wagner und mit dem Publikum.

Neo-Romantik im virtuellen Zeitalter

Wenn die Band ›Unheilig‹ singt: »Kein Augenblick ist je verloren, wenn er im Herzen weiterlebt« oder Mark Foster zu Geigenklängen intoniert »Ich geh auf Reisen. Ich mach alles das, was ich verpasst hab. Ich lass alles hinter mir. Hab was Großes im Visier«, dann sind wir am Puls unserer Zeit. Die Utopie von einem echten, wahren Leben treibt uns um – manchmal in erschreckend abgedroschenen Phrasen.

Von Shabby-Chic über Extremsport bis Rückzug – wir sind auf der Jagd nach dem echten Gefühl. Die einen ziehen sich in ihre Eigenheim-Idyllen zurück, heiraten in einem Traum von Weiß und pflegen ihren Dialekt. Die anderen suchen ruhelos das Glück in der Ferne – mithilfe von Eventtourismus oder gar im militärischen Kampf für das vermeintlich Gute.

Christian Saehrendt sucht nach der Kraft hinter all diesen paradoxen Fluchtbewegungen – und stellt fest: Wir leben in einer Epoche der Neo-Romantik, die wie vor gut 200 Jahren als Folge einer tiefgreifenden Entfremdung zu verstehen ist.


Christian Saehrendt, Gefühlige Zeiten. Die Zwanghafte Sehnsucht nach dem Echten (Köln: DuMont, 2015).