the sunflower in our garden grew as tall as a tree

an exhibition by LEA RÜEGG

the sunflower in our garden grew as tall as a tree (2023) is Swiss filmmaker, performer and sound artist Lea Rüegg’s (they/them/no pronouns) most recent video work. They invite us into a cinematic time and space populated by friends and lovers, anecdotes and recollections of experiences, musings and narrative assemblages. This space is deeply personal, intimate even. The narrating voice speaks about hormones and transitioning, about abortion. It speaks of these instances without distinguishing who specifically experienced them. It remembers tales of Wilf and Fran, Marco, Milo, Antonia, Rebecca, Lou, Tristan, Peanut and Georgina. The camera used to shoot this video produces two perspectives that can be stitched together digitally into a 360-degree image. The person cannot hide behind the camera anymore. They become part of the crafted image. Lea Rüegg evidences the multiplicity of perspectives that manifest both technologically and narratively, but also the multiplicity of self/s, the commoning of experience and memory perhaps within a group of kin. They carefully and tenderly nurse these memories and experiences.

Lea Rüegg (they/them/no pronouns) is a filmmaker, performer and sound artist born in 1992 in Zurich (CH) and currently living and working in Zurich, Basel (CH) and Paris (FR).

One of the core elements of their work is the motivation for storytelling. For Lea, the sharing of embodied knowledge and intimacies are understood as strategies of political resistance. Somatic forms of language such as poetry, songs, prayers or spells and their world-making potential are one of their recent research interests. Their voice is their main tool and acts as a carrier and transmitter of feeling, allowing moments of intimacy with the audience. In allowing their voice to embody various affective states, they expand and complicate binary ideas of the self. In Lea’s process of performative writing, autobiographical observations of everyday life and of being-in-relation-to influence the text and visual language, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between subject and object toward an animistic understanding of the world. Collaborations are and have been an important part of Lea’s artistic identity and are born from a belief in the power of connection and the importance of building communities.

This exhibition has been curated by marc norbert hörler.

OPENING:

26 April 2024 6-8 pm

HOURS:

26 April 2024 3-6 pm

27-28 April 2024 1-3 pm