Jardin d’Hiver #1: Comment peut-on être (du village d’à côté) persan (martien)? / Jean Otth: Spaces of Projection

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA), is pleased to announce the first edition of its biennial exhibition series Jardin d’Hiver dedicated to contemporary art from the region and a solo exhibition of Swiss video art pioneer Jean Otth (1940–2013).

Jardin d’Hiver #1: Comment peut-on être (du village d’à côté) persan (martien)?
With the mysterious title Comment peut-on être (du village d’à côté) persan (martien)? (literally “How can one be [from the nearby village] Persian [Martian]?”), the exhibition examines the concept of the art scene in light of several principles, i.e., guest artists, five independent venues, and collage as a way of visually sizing up the dynamics that run through and structure any art scene. The show’s title is a quotation drawn from the 1972 Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (“Encyclopedia of Utopia, Extraordinary Journeys, and Science Fiction”), by Pierre Versins (1923–2001), a Frenchman living in Lausanne whose own collection would eventually form the original collection of the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains. By appropriating the quotation, curator Jill Gasparina makes the question, which articulates the near and the far on three levels—the “nearby village,” the “Persian,” and the “Martian”—the key to her thinking about what makes and shapes an art scene yet never freezes it in place. The curator has thus chosen to go beyond the question of identity and highlight not only several generations of artists, but also institutional connections (from the off space to the museum, from emerging art practices to the collection). Embracing a logic that is partly subjective and partly based on chance, she has invited a range of artists and art spaces (Circuit, Collectif RATS, Silicon Malley, Tunnel Tunnel, and Urgent Paradise), and these have in turn extended the invitation to others, injecting greater complexity—organically, with each addition—into the network that has been brought to light. The thirty-two participants will be exhibiting both existing artworks and pieces created specifically for the event. The exhibition makes no claims of being the definitive portrait of the contemporary art scene in Vaud. Rather it aims to transmit, in fragmentary form, the broad variety that characterizes it.

Curated by Jill Gasparina, art critic, curator, and teacher at HEAD – Geneva.

Participating artists and art spaces: Alfatih, Jérôme Wilfredo Baccaglio, Francis Baudevin, Giovanna Belossi, Christine Boumeester, Leonora Carrington, Françoise Chaillet, Circuit, Delphine Coindet, Collectif RATS, Ligia Dias, Raquel Dias, Lucas Erin, Mathis Gasser, Julien Gremaud, Rosanne Kapela, Daniela Keiser, Stéphane Kropf, Flora Mottini, Yoan Mudry, Guido Nussbaum, Véra Pagava, Urgent Paradise, Laurence Pittet, Gina Proenza, Denis Savary,  Silicon Malley, Viktor Tibay, Anouk Tschanz, Caroline Tschumi, Tunnel Tunnel, and Pierre Vadi.

Jean Otth: Spaces of Projection
A pioneer of video art in Switzerland, Jean Otth (1940–2013), in the 1960s, began using the visual possibilities being made available by the new technologies of the day, i.e., the slide as a projected and dematerialized image; television and its particular idiom; and the shifting experimental character of video. Whether working with moving images, painting, drawing, or installations, it is the questions and issues of representation itself that lie at the heart of Jean Otth’s experiments more than his attachment to any one medium in particular.

The show offers an overview of nearly 50 years of artmaking, all mediums included. It allows to take stock of both the depth and diversity of a body of work that is centred on the dialectic tension between representation and nonrepresentation, visibility and obliteration, presence and absence, in an endlessly renegotiated balance on the shifting line that marks the limit. Painted (on canvas, paper, mirrored glass), drawn (in pencil, spray paint, gloss paint), manipulated (with the use of a monitor and video, and later with the computer and its screen), and projected (on the wall, paper, objects), the image as a recording of reality can by turns be seen and drop out of sight, be present and go missing. For it is the very possibility of its materialization, and hence visibility, which is at play in Jean Otth’s work. The female body and the desire to see or, more precisely, the desire to know formed the visible pivot of his questioning for a long stretch of his career. Experimentation with different mediums was an attempt to enlarge the space of possibilities and would lead to the abstraction of his video installations over the last decade of his career.

Curated by Nicole Schweizer, curator of contemporary art, MCBA.

Events
June 24, 6:30pm
Jardin d’Hiver #1 – Lecture “Scènes artistiques: la part urbaine des questions culturelles” by Luca Pattaroni, lecturer and researcher, Laboratory of Urban Sociology, EPFL

September 2, 6:30pm
Jean Otth: Spaces of Projection – Lecture-screening “Jean Otth et les réseaux de l’art vidéo”: exposition, rencontre, festival (des Rencontres internationales ouvertes de vidéo du Centre d’art et communication de Buenos Aires au VideoArtFestival Locarno) by François Bovier, lecturer and researcher at the Section d’histoire et esthétique du cinéma, Université de Lausanne, and research fellow at ECAL-Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne.

Publications
Jill Gasparina (ed.), Comment peut-on être (du village d’à côté) persan (martien)?, with essays by Jill Gasparina and Olivier Vadrot, and a set of notes written by the featured artists on a range of subjects, e.g., the art scene, landscape, group practices, and the art and artmaking economy (FR), 32 p., Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts of Lausanne, 2021 (coll. Jardin d’Hiver, n. 1), 1 ill. Price: 5 CHF.

Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Jean Otth: Travaux/Works, 1964–2013, with essays by Robert Ireland, Agathe Jarczyk, Elisabeth Jobin, Geneviève Loup, and an introduction by Nicole Schweizer. Co-published by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne and Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2020 (Fr./En.), 256 p., 381 ill. Price: 39 CHF in bookshops / 35 CHF at the MCBA bookshop.

Contact shop.mcba@vd.ch to order online.