PRESS RELEASE

STALKE presents the exhibition
Make Believe
featuring Susann Walder, Christoph Draeger, and Per Traasdahl

Exhibition concept and text: Christoph Doswald

August 14 - September 12, 1998

STALKE's first exhibition of the new season presents the Danish painter Per Traasdahl (*1962) alongside guest artists. Traasdahl has lived in Zurich for five years. For the exhibition, he has invited the Swiss artists Susann Walder (Zurich, *1959) and Christoph Draeger (New York, *1965), as well as the writer and curator Christoph Doswald (Zurich, *1961).

Make Believe
[to imagine or pretend]

It is clear to anyone that there are precise boundaries for what is required of an expression or action for it to be called language. This censorship is a necessary tool in our exchange of power and awareness. It is an ongoing interplay between fact and fiction. But when we view a specific situation, references to facts are often rendered powerless by individual imagination. Facts lie hidden behind the filter of fiction, and we are pointed toward the unavoidable decay (and emergence) of time, where truth and lies can alternate in fractions of a second.

Christoph Draeger
(1997: Clocktower, PS1, New York; 1998: Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen)
Video projection - remake of violent scenes from Hollywood films - featuring himself as an actor.

Per Traasdahl
(1997: Junge Kunst International '97, Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lübeck)
Painted fictional faces - larger than life - focusing on two people in contact.

Susann Walder
(1996: Manifesta 1, Rotterdam; 1998: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich)
Masses of found and homemade objects - singing with playback or a cappella.

Review

Familiar Themes in the Exhibition

Stalke Galleri, Vesterbrogade 14 A, Copenhagen: MAKE BELIEVE
On view until September 12

It is by now an old story that truth is a somewhat diffuse concept. Media-created realities have erased the boundaries between truth and lies, fact and fiction. We are shaped and influenced by the context, or what one might call the surroundings, increasingly pointing to economic power structures in the media world as our time’s true force.

At Stalke Gallery, these themes are explored in a Danish-Swiss exhibition project that features painting, video, and installation art.

The film industry has, for better or worse, a significant influence on how we shape our identity. With humorous twists, Christoph Draeger inserts himself into famous Hollywood violence scenes. Clips from high-paced sequences in Dirty Harry, Thelma and Louise, and Taxi Driver are mixed with Draeger's own keys and skillfully executed recordings of himself and friends, who eagerly assume the roles of Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro.

Susan Walder’s installation

Susan Walder's installation is a kind of cabinet of objects. A room filled from floor to ceiling with found and homemade items. Generally, these are objects that relate to the world of children and youth: plastic toys, bead trays, vests from craft kits, idol posters, Russian information boards, etc.

Captivating

The items captivate with their looseness and messiness. Loosely organized and sorted into groups, they narrate cascades of things about ever-changing pedagogical models. And even in this loosely systematic presentation, attention is drawn to the background of the objects.

The Danish painter Per Traasdahl participates with a series of peculiar double portraits. Meetings between people depicted in contact with each other in a sickly abstract realism. However, one does not sense any real connection between the individuals, which is emphasized by the white ahistorical background, upon which silhouetted faces are placed.

But what painting can offer in relation to mass media today is a question embedded in Traasdahl's project, which does not necessarily speak to the advantage of painting.

By MALENE LA COUR RASMUSSEN