Annelies Strba - Crista Ziegler
Annelies Strba (1947) and Crista Ziegler (1965) are two photographers, whose kinship lies somehow in the impossibility to apply any classical definition of the medium photography. They neither use photography as time-catcher and -creator, nor as medium for a technicistic view of life. In their work, document and vision merge in a way that allows the observer a more direct, emotional and imaginative access to the world.

Annelies Strba combines in her new group of works An (1998199) immaterial visions of New York and Paris as allegories for the world of light and for Hades, with an innocent, lucid child functioning as mediator between the two worlds.

In weak, morbid colours, the skyscrapers of Manhattan resemble visions of a fantastic dreamlike architecture, immaterially sunk into the photopaper. The blonde, naked boy is the representation of innocence, a little angel, whose body gleams as if heavenly light would emerge from him. The child's beaming body illuminates his environment, being Lucifer, who brought the light to the world, and its Salvator at the same time.
For the first time at arsFutura Strba shows her new group of works An where she combines videoprints of her New York-Video (music by sci-fi radio, ca. 6Omin.) with photographs of her grandson.
With the technical media photography and video Strba creates visionary images that are not fixed in time and which give way to interpretations beyond visibility, offering the observer to forget all urban stereotypes of a modem Babylon or ,,melting pot" and to experience the magic of places. The big tableaux permit to immerse in Strba's subjective views of the world, which reveal a permanent tension between archetypes and visions of the future.

Crista Ziegler

Excerpt from a text by Angelika Beckmann (Eikon 26127, 1999) Translation K. Herzog

In her photographs Crista Ziegler creates relationships between people that remain uncertain in real life.

The use of a hasselblad allows the artist, while standing still and looking through the camera from the top, to remain unobserved by her object and so to freeze microscopic moments of an unlimited sum of possibilities of the urban macrocosm.
Everyday situations of a metropolis, transient encounters, a never-ending stream of passers by coagulate in their serial arrangement into social patterns. At the same time however, the observer is bound to read each picture as the beginning of an individual story where the secret of what is true and what is manipulated must remain unsolved by Crista Ziegler's magic transition of reality and fiction.

On the occasion of our exhibition we present Crista Ziegler's new book "Schauplatz - public scene" of works made during her last stay in Paris, 1998.

Strba lives with her family and friends in Richterswil. Ziegler lives and works in Basel and Paris.