Artists

Marisa Cornejo, Pascale Eiberle, Esther Ernst, Mark Formanek, Michel Gilgen, Johanna Müller, Jos Näpflin, Lea Schaffner, Jonathan Steiger, Sabine Troendle, Franz Wanner, Olivia Wiederkehr, Uwe Wittwer

Press release

The past cleaves to the present, as the title of this exhibition describes: [il] passato [è] presente. As Augustine of Hippo remarked 1500 years ago, there is no past as such, only ‘a present of things past’ as perceived by the mind. The past accompanies us as memory, because according to Novalis ‘all remembrance is the present’.

Memories can be vivid or fleeting, enduring or ephemeral, painful or imagined. Our lives are shaped by personal experience, but also by events that have entered the collective memory. The works by thirteen artists exhibited here sound out both the scope and the limits of remembrance. They address those traumatic experiences that sear our souls like sheets of paper. They define the whiff of suffering that surrounds us like an invisible veil, or they visualise the simultaneity of absence and presence. Even the yearning for the ‘good old days’ and for nostalgia itself is here reworked as art.

The exhibition is an invitation to ponder the many different ways in which we preserve the past – or detach ourselves from it.