Real Life is Elsewhere, 2011
sand, dimensions variable
installation views at Kunsthaus Glarus, 2011

–

–

–

—

–

.

Plenty of None, 2010
sand, clothes, expoxy. 700 x 500 cm.
installation views at Chert, Berlin, September 2010

all images courtesy of the artist and Chert, Berlin

–

VANESSA SAFAVI is a Swiss artist whose work explores the gap that exists between the interpretation connected to reality and its symbolism. Through installations, sculptures and collages, she mixes ideas, signs and materials from different places and times. Like the rest of her work, these purposes with sand (above) are very open to interpretation and leave the spectator completely free. It’s precisely like in a desert, where initially the most striking feature is an immense open space without any limits or directions.

Real Life is Elsewhere (2011), shown in the Kunsthaus Glarus, is a continuation and a response to Plenty of None (2010), shown in Chert, Berlin: I like to consider the piece as a total landscape that generates its own products and its own life. The small-scale sculpture are made of the sand itself, scattered unevenly on the surface. They remind us of a familiar feeling of desert visions. But it is important to understand that there is something elusive, uncanny, fascinating beneath the surface of what at first seems easy to understand, ordinary or even banal, a space in itself, a domain of pure metaphor where logic is suspended. – VANESSA SAFAVI in conversation with JENNIFER CHERT

VANESSA SAFAVI graduated from the ECAL/Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne in 2007, since then her work has been shown in group exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Basel and the Fri-Art in Fribourg as well as in solo exhibitions in the Kunsthaus Glarus (Switzerland), the Galerie Claudia Groeflin in Zürich, the Galerie Chert in Berlin and the Palais bleu in Trogen. Her first monograph was published in 2010 in the series of the Collection Cahiers d‘Artistes of Pro Helvetia.

Additionally ‘Blind Traveller’ has been released this year on the occasion of the exhibitions: ‘Resorts’, Kunsthaus Glarus and ‘Between the Tree and a Plastic Chair’, at Chert, Berlin and is available at Motto.