Gabriela Löffel: The Grammar of Interstices

Gabriela Löffel’s (*1972) solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Appenzell examines how political and economic power operates through language, images, spaces and technical systems. Her video works emerge from long-term research conducted in restricted-access environments such as military training grounds, international financial conferences, film studios, and courtrooms. Rather than seeking to reveal what is hidden, Löffel explores how reality is constructed and mediated: Who speaks? What remains audible or invisible? What role do staging, translation and architecture play? Voices, pauses and interference become as significant as images. The resulting multilayered installations make complex relationships perceptible from different perspectives.

The exhibition brings together works spanning the past two decades. Setting (2011) explores the staging of war and its audiovisual mediation through language, sound and projection, drawing on accounts by former extras at the US military training ground in Grafenwöhr. The photographic work Unseen (2016) examines how the architecture of exhibition stands at Sibos 2016 in Geneva stages and regulates visibility within global finance, placing the strategic invisibility of its actors at the centre. In Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity (2024), experts in politics, law, journalism and linguistics analyse and reconstruct unintelligible passages from an audio recording of an offshore finance conference in a recording studio.

Löffel’s latest work, for the record (2026), is a multi-channel video installation that investigates the collapse of Lebanon’s banking system and possible connections to Switzerland’s financial centre. It draws on journalistic investigations into the case of former Lebanese central bank governor Riad Salamé, raising questions of money laundering, embezzlement of public funds and transnational financial accountability.

For this work, Löffel collaborates with Lebanese journalists, legal professionals, universities and students. Drawing on archival material, she has developed a fictional legal case in which an invented Swiss bank, the Swiss Trust Bank, faces questions concerning its potential complicity in the collapse of Lebanon’s banking system. The case was staged and filmed in Beirut as a mock trial involving law students.

The work shifts real political and economic relationships into the realm of law and fiction. This creates distance from immediate current affairs without diminishing the urgency of the subject. At the same time, the film studio itself – Forest Studio Beirut – is revealed as a site of staging. Its architecture, technology and infrastructure reflect the invisible infrastructures of the financial industry.

Alongside the solo exhibition, Gabriela Löffel curates the video programme Imagining Kunsthalle, featuring works by Basma al-Sharif, Marwa Arsanios, Haig Aivazian, Border Forensics, Miranda Pennell and Mohamed Choucair.