[In Yves Netzhammer’s special] […] installation […] drawing, architecture, video projection and soundtracks all interact. […] With its dynamic line drawings and stippling via sight and sound attractors, it multiplies the experience of space and time and articulates a sophisticated relationship between picture, movement and narrative. […] [In ‘The Subjectivisation of Repetition’] “the alien” appears in the form of repressed, psychological subject matter, unseen body innards, shadow bodies, different skin colours and signs of cultural otherness. The coalescence of these motifs creates unusual relationships of self and alien, individual case and universal problem, in an effort to overcome reduction to opposing dualities and provoke discussion of the mechanisms of self-localisation. […]

In Netzhammer’s gauging/searching approach, the “world” does not appear as an available, negotiable mass, but as a complex other with a dignity of its own. This impression arises from the specific relationship between form and movement. The processes intimated in Netzhammer’s drawings and the gestures that appear in his video films generate a very specific impression of physicality. The picture experience transmits a sense of possible materiality, a heightened sensitivity to its significance. Insofar as Netzhammer’s works allow the paradoxical “possibility of an impossible touch” to be experienced, they also sharpen the senses to the phenomena of the material world whilst respecting their incomprehensibility — wonders that can never be understood or described in their entirety. The artist implements this extension and conservation of a multiplicity of world phenomena through precise handling of recalcitrant signs and through subtle composition that informs his pictures with a sensitivity to the world. “Figuration” and “form” in Netzhammer’s œuvre mean the exact demarcation and appreciation of impressions — impressions of incomprehensible and alien circumstances —that should be promised a place in our culture to help influence its boundaries.

(Excerpt from Tim Zulauf: Media release by Swiss federal office of culture, May 2007 on the occasion of Yves Netzhammer’s exhibition in the Venice Biennale 2007)

Soundtrack by Bernd Schurer

Courtesy Galerie Anita Beckers