Klöntal Triennale 2014
A Place Like This
25 May–10 August 2014
Opening: Saturday, 24 May, 1:30–9:30pm
Curators: Alexandra Blättler and Sabine Rusterholz Petko
Artists:
Hans Alder, Kai Althoff, Shannon Bool, Sarah Burger, Stefan Burger, Noa Eshkol, Honey-Suckle Company, Thomas Julier, Kariel, Rudolf Koller, Maria Loboda, Fabian Marti, Otto Meyer-Amden, Dane Mitchell, Christian Philipp Müller, David Renggli, Marta Riniker-Radich, Adele Röder, Michael Sailstorfer, Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier, Jerszy Seymour, Johann Gottfried Steffan, Hannah Weinberger
A Place Like This, a first-ever curated summertime exhibition, takes up this theme, presenting 23 international positions at selected locations in Klöntal Valley and at Kunsthaus Glarus. A majority of the new works created specifically for this location directly reference Klöntal Valley’s rich artistic tradition. The contemporary artists are invited to engage and activate the location and its heritage, the landscape and nature and also to question the historical topoi from a present-day perspective.
Today there are multiple attempts—tried out in artists’ colonies of past centuries, for example, in Barbizon, Worpswede, or at Monte Verità—to escape the control, constraints, and the hustle and bustle of urban centers. And it is the engagement with far-flung locations, nature, and the communal as alternative or complement to daily urban life that is once again highly relevant today. Thus, in the works represented in the Klöntal Triennale 2014, one also comes across various pieces dealing with themes of withdrawing from society or even the art world; for example, with a project by Stefan Burger, as well as those that take up and advance the concept of artists’ communities, such as Honey-Suckle Company. Also, the erstwhile concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art) is adapted to the present day: themes like body culture such as a performance documentation of a wrestling fight by Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier, dance performance by Noa Eshkol, and a clothing project by Adele Röder are represented here as well as the ambivalent love of nature in projects by Maria Loboda, the archetypical landscape by Christian Philipp Müller, alternative lifestyles and an unease with present day society by Kai Althoff, Jerszy Seymour and Fabian Marti, as well as esotericism and knowledge of herbs with a project by Dane Mitchell.
In this endeavor, the artists have an illustrious past to draw from: the Zurich-based painter Conrad Meyer and his Dutch colleague Jan Hackaert documented the valley, the mountains, and the lake as early as 1655, and, in the eighteenth century, it was also a stop for English painters on their grand tours through the Swiss Alps, and by the time European landscape painting and the Swiss Alps theme came to full fruition in the mid-19th century, Klöntal Valley had become a popular meeting place for artists and those connected to nature, including Rudolf Koller or Johann Gottfried Steffan, who formed an artists’ colony in a picturesque maple grove in Richisau in 1856. In the past twenty years, projects have been realized by Carl Andre, Balthasar Burkhard, Richard Long, Roman Signer, Fischli/Weiss, Christoph Büchel, and many others.