An exhibition by Gregory Hari

with the support of Lavdrim Dzemailji

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Opening: Saturday, 08 October 2016, starting at 18:00h
with a performance by Gregory Hari at 19:00h.

Saturday, 08 October 2016 - Friday, 21 October 2016

Further performances by Gregory Hari on Friday, 14 and Friday, 21 October 2016, 20:00h (door opens 19:00h).


Opening hours during this exhibition / Öffnungszeiten während dieser Ausstellung

Wed 15:00h - 18:00h // Mi 15:00h - 18:00h
Thu 16:00h - 19:00h // Do 16:00h - 19:00h
Fri 15:00h - 18:00h // Fr 15:00h - 18:00h


begone before somebody drops a house on you too

“Suddenly, this story came in and took possession. It really seemed to write itself.” L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

With his exhibition project at Corner College, Gregory Hari undertakes an experiment with the medium of exhibition and performativity, site specificity and the relation between mapping and performance. He further explores issues on belonging and territory, home and journey, inspired by the contexts of the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by Lyman Frank Baum and published in 1900, and its most successful and popular movie/musical adaptation starring 13-year-old Judy Garland, which launched in 1939 to six Oscar nominations, and become influential for the new era of Walt Disney and the later Disney Empire, and by their aesthetic, social and political impact in the mainstream and in subculture.

The artist generates a performative map or diagram of movements and fragments that will open up a process, and project power-knowledge relations that reveal the hidden social and political issues and their potential to aesthetically and critically engage the audience. But the production of the event is not an ‘exchange of knowledge for power,’ nor a symbolic force. The performance confronts the audience with its archival moment across various narratives structures, and scatters in an-other geography of a journey as a vehicle for metamorphoses that go through contradictory permutations, as every act activates on this topography the performing strategies of an Odyssey. The topography becomes a “science of the sensible – the science of total joy,” a chaosmos journey of micro-physical mapping and mind-map of micro-desires. They are a journey as a cognitive concept and narrative future of a body, interwoven with Gregory Hari’s research materials, which displays the source of his movements and directions.

The artist situates himself on a yellow strip around one meter wide, where his performance takes place. He improvises ‘across seemingly exhaustive ground.’ It is a process of taking place – a particular place and a particular time. The performance transforms these temporal and spatial categories to a “threshold” that un-rolls an-other flexible and self-multiplying strip of impersonalized and individuated, self-constructed temporal and spatial relativity that constitutes a world yet to be explored. The artist’s performance starts from this particular coordinate of time and space where it takes place and places things in context. With this, the artist emphasizes a dependence of his performance on its specific chronotope (Bakhtin) that animates a process of ‘endlessly’ expanding its performative territory with the time of the body’s movements and the “time space” of the traveler who carries this place with themselves as they travel through it. A journey like a blank page.

“Green clothes the earth in tranquillity, ebbs and flows with the seasons. In it is the hope of Resurrection. We feel green has more shades than any other colour, as the buds break the winter dun in the hedges. Hallucinatory sunny days.” (Derek Jarman)

“Did they secretly drag up in all those emerald dresses that the girls had cast off?” (Derek Jarman)

Hallucinatory sunny days and perception of landscape in a journey, a journey in colors separated in a three-strip process by diffraction and subtraction! Transferences! For this dazzling rainbow palette, “brilliant, gorgeous, painted, gay”:

Red stands for the ruby slippers/red shoes
Yellow stands for the yellow brick road
Green stands for the Emerald City of Oz
(Gregory Hari)

Green: “Green is a colour which exists in narratives … it always returns. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”
Yellow: “The nimbus of the saints, haloes and auras. These are the yellows of hope.
The joy of black and yellow Prospect Cottage. Black as pitch with bright yellow windows, it welcomes you.
Yellow is a combination of red and green light. There are no yellow receptors in the eye.”
Red: “Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.”
“Red explodes and consumes itself.”
“Liverpool. Early 1980s. I join the march. V. (REDgrave) says, ‘Derek, you carry a red flag.’ There are fifty of us. The ghostly galleon of revolution past. We march through the deserted and derelict city with the sound of the wind whipping through the flags, a rosy galleon on the high sea of hope. The sunlight dyeing us red. Shipwrecked on the last coral-reef of optimism. Someone says to me, ‘The red of the square is beautiful. The root of the red is life itself.’”
(Derek Jarman)

Excerpts from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova (PDF, 181KB).


Diese Ausstellung ist Teil der Plattform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the
Practices of Art – Questions of Participation von Corner College, konzipiert von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth, und wird unterstützt vom Nachwuchsförderungsprogramm der Pro Helvetia.

Starting from Lia Perjovschi’s early performance work of the 1980’s and scrutinizing how it relates to her current artistic practice of opening new spaces of knowledge and re-organizing those spaces, Louveau & Perjovschi want to propose a conversation about performance art, the connection of art and research, and different approaches to filling gaps with art, thus shortcutting 30 years of artistic practice and its context from communism to capitalism, from the local to the global art scene.

SPARCK – Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge - operates without a centre, physical or otherwise. It understands itself as a node in a network of likeminded practitioners stemming from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. These relationships are lateral and projects emerge through ongoing conversations. The results are collaborative experiments, rarely shown in white cube settings but rather tested in flexible approaches across multiple sites from street to studio to online. These incarnations are driven by a shared interest in tackling questions about the global urban condition. Re-readings and alternative knowledge is generated through a process of speculation. The politics intrinsic to the work and its creators do not only frame the content but, maybe more importantly, guide a practice of engagement.

Co-organized by Corner College and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating of ZHdK (as part of their series Talks on Curatorial Practice).

On/Off Booth B1, ABB Event Hall, Zürich-Oerlikon | http://www.onoff.today/

With the participation of Nicolasa Navarrete, Cora Piantoni, Saman Anabel Sarabi, Anne Käthi Wehrli

Assistant for the Corner College presentation at On/Off: Alicia Olmos Ochoa
Corner College Intern: Miwa Negoro

Wednesday, 26.10.2016 - Sunday, 30.10.2016

Sunday, 30.10.2016

13:00h-15:00h Anabel Sarabi, zwei Runden Klans und Kompliz_innen, Tischspiel für 2 oder mehr Spieler_innen.

16:00h Gedichte und theoretisches Saxophon Wieso merkt niemand dass dieser Stuhl eine Brennnessel ist! by Anne Käthi Wehrli. Danach Preview ihres neuen Zines In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt.



Nicolasa Navarrete

Illustrating Das Kapital. Volume one, 1
The end of truth
2014. Graphite on paper. 200cm x 100cm.

The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold. The equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.



Cora Piantoni

Songs of Work
2 channel video installation, sound, 11:25 min, 2014.



Cora Piantoni develops her films on the basis of interviews together with moving images and re-enactments of past events. For an exhibition at the stonemason’s cooperative in Porto, she continued her research about worker‘s communities, focusing on the worker's tradtional songs and the sound of the working process. Do the traditional songs still exist which reflect the monotony of the work, but also help to perform it? In what other way sound / rhythm / music plays a role at work? Besides the masons, Piantoni was interested in the background and culture of the students of the school which is now located in the building of the cooperative. She connected the young generation of the students with the older generation of the masons who are working at the factory and are aware of the history.



Saman Anabel Sarabi

Klans und Kompliz_innen
Tischspiel für 2 oder mehr Spieler_innen
konzipiert von Saman Anabel Sarabi and Josefine



The card game Klans und Kompliz_innen investigates through joyful and playful conversations the different links and alliances between people within the Zürich art scene and beyond. The table game offers a situation for curious and open people to contact with each other in a playful setting. It allows to inform each other and share and connect information and knowledge.

Curious to play with us? Please register here! And: bring some values with you. We are expecting you with pleasure and curiosity!

We are there on Sunday, 30 October, for two sessions of the game, 14:00h-15:00h, and 17:30h-18:30h.

Corner College in collaboration with Saman Anabel Sarabi and Josefine

http://www.hightimepublishers.com/



Anne Käthi Wehrli

Wieso merkt niemand dass dieser Stuhl eine Brennnessel ist!
Gedichte, Theoretisches Saxophon



Mütterlich lachten die Pflanzen.
Es war in Ordnung. Ich durfte über sie reden und mir Sachen über sie vorstellen.
Es störte sich nicht.

Sogar die Giftpflanzen sagten jedesmal wenn ich eine essen wollte: Nein! Wir sind giftig!
Weil wir Freunde waren.


In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt
2016. 96 Seiten. Gedichte, Texte und Zeichnungen.

Zine-Vernissage am Sonntag, 30. Oktober um 16:00h.



In den Lebensmitteln drin geht es zu und her wie in einer Stadt. Der Titel dieser Publikation stammt aus einem Gedicht, entstanden bei der Arbeit an einem Beitrag, der Performance „These we have tried …“, für den Anlass „Alice Toklas reads her famous hashish fudge recipe“, der 2015 in Wien stattfand. In dieser Performance geht es um die Zubereitung von Fudge und um das berühmte Haschisch Fudge Rezept von Alice Toklas, um Hausfrauen, Sprache, Chemie, Zufall und feine Unterschiede. Ein Teil daraus findet sich in dieser Publikation.

Der Text „Die Frau als Einstiegsloch“ ist während der Gruppenausstellung No‑where? No-here! The Molecular Books of Life – Colleges of Unreason 2016 im Corner College entstanden. Mehrmals während der Ausstellungsdauer erschien eine neue Fassung des Texts als Fanzine. Der Text ist noch nicht abgeschlossen.

Auch weitere Beiträge dieses Buchs kamen schon an anderen Orten und in anderen Formaten vor. In Fanzines, Ausstellungen, Radiosendungen. Zeichnungen an Performances, Gedichte als Teil von Texten. Einige waren bisher unveröffentlicht. Die Zeichnungen und Collagen sind aus der Zeit von ca. 1993-2016. Zusammen mit den Texten, die alle neueren Datums sind, sind sie jetzt für dieses Buch neu versammelt worden.

On Thu / Fri / Sat, 27 / 28 / 29 October
each day from 14:00h to 18:00h
Public talk and discussion on Saturday, 29 October at 19:00h


Mohammad Namazi presents 'Entropische Iteration' (Entropic Iteration) as a reflection on his residency experience as part of the Freiraum-Stipendium – the index collective residency programme. The artist installs a three-days open laboratory at Corner College, which will end in a public talk and discussion. Namazi shows new work made during his residency in Zurich that utilises the Internet, installation and video formats. In his talk he presents his new experiments and talks about his research and practice in general.

Locating the numerous water fountains that are a feature specific to the urban experience of Zurich, Namazi re-imagines these sites as physical manifestos that are actualised as temporary non-hierarchical social platforms. A series of web pages have been created to map out a selection of these encounters. Through these online networks, linkages and locations - sound recordings, image editing and HTML programming are used to spatialize and demonstrate the physical and off-line reality on the virtual and online environment.