Make Belive
Christoph Draeger, Susan Walder
and Per Traasdahl
Stalke Galleri
Vesterbrogade 14A
14.8. to 12.9. 1998
STALKE’s first exhibition of the new season presented the Danish painter Per Traasdahl alongside invited guest artists. At the time, Traasdahl had lived in Zurich for five years. For the exhibition, he invited the Swiss artists Susann Walder and Christoph Draeger, as well as the writer and curator Christoph Doswald.
Make Believe
(to imagine or pretend)
The exhibition addressed the boundaries of language and expression, describing censorship as a structural condition within exchanges of power and awareness. It articulated an ongoing interplay between fact and fiction, where references to facts were often rendered unstable by individual imagination. Facts were positioned behind a filter of fiction, pointing toward the continuous decay and emergence of time, in which truth and falsehood could alternate within fractions of a second.
Christoph Draeger
Draeger presented a video projection composed of remade violent scenes from Hollywood films, featuring himself as an actor.
Per Traasdahl
Traasdahl presented painted fictional faces, larger than life, focusing on encounters between two figures in close contact.
Susann Walder
Walder presented accumulations of found and handmade objects, accompanied by singing, either with playback or performed a cappella.
Artwork by Susan Walder titled 13, featuring a divided panel with textured grey paint and copper-colored numerals, exhibited in Make Believe at Stalke Galleri, 1998.
Installation by Susan Walder from Make Believe (1998) at Stalke Galleri. The space features wall-mounted drawings, textiles, photographs, and found objects arranged in a vibrant, collage-like composition that blends personal imagery, pop references, and handcrafted materials.
Photographic works by Christoph Draeger exhibited in Make Believe, Stalke Galleri, 1998
Painting by Per Traasdal exhibited in Make Believe, Stalke Galleri, 1998.
In a review published in Jyllands-Posten, Malene La Cour Rasmussen discussed the exhibition Make Believe at Stalke Gallery as a presentation of familiar themes concerning the relationship between reality and fiction, identity, and staging. She noted how the exhibition brought together painting, video, and installation within a shared field of investigation, where distinctions between the factual and the constructed appeared increasingly fluid.
The reviewer highlighted Christoph Draeger’s use of cinematic references and self-representation, describing how the artist inserted himself into recognizable Hollywood sequences. Susann Walder’s installation was described as a cabinet-like arrangement of found and handmade objects, evoking associations with childhood, memory, and everyday culture. Per Traasdahl’s paintings were characterized as double portraits that explored interpersonal encounters through a combination of realism and abstraction.
Overall, the exhibition was framed as a reflection on contemporary image and media culture, in which meaning emerged in the tension between the personal, the social, and representation.
Front cover of the exhibition catalogue forMake Believe, designed as a visual introduction to the exhibition’s central themes.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue Make Believe, Stalke Galleri, 1998
(paraphrased)
The exhibition text reflects on the shifting relationship between reality and construction within a contemporary condition shaped by media, simulation, and fragmented experience. Art is described as a space in which meaning is not fixed, but produced through interaction between artistic intention, contextual framing, and the viewer’s presence.
The three artistic positions presented in Make Believe approach this inquiry through distinct practices: performative and installation-based strategies, filmic reconstruction, and painting as a site where proximity and distance are deliberately staged. Across these approaches, imagination, manipulation, and repetition are understood not as opposites of reality, but as mechanisms through which reality is negotiated and reconfigured.
Belief is addressed not as a guarantee of authenticity, but as an active force operating within artistic production and social perception. In this way, Make Believe frames artistic self-assertion and spectatorship at a moment when the boundary between fact and fiction has become increasingly unstable.