Koondhor Panorama
September 2022
Curated by Lhaga Namlha Koondhor
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève introduces the second chapter of its Swiss Panorama, a 5th floor program presenting a selection of digital works recently produced by Swiss artists, or artists living in Switzerland, which aims to draw a panorama of the territories and forms emerging from the local art scene. This monthly program will be curated by Lhaga Namlha Koondhor.
The practice of interdisciplinary curator and artist, Lhaga Namlha Koondhor spans across curatorial work, creative direction, and music programming. Her projects, always relating to lyrical themes (parasitism, breeding, pop and counterculture), articulate themselves much like theory-fiction and oral mythology. They are thoroughly informed by a collaborative approach, never possessing a dominant authorial voice, but rather articulating themselves by including other voices and being marked by a shared understanding.
Lhaga Namlha Koondhor, also known as Asian Eyez, born in Switzerland, lives and works between Zurich and Shanghai. Koondhor is a curator and cultural provocateur that spent her career breaking boundaries and establishing inclusive strategies. By finding innovative ways to bring together her network and community, she creates artistic interventions that look beyond existing systems and deepen the notion of communality.
Medjid Sopi
Untitled
2022
In a time when we are used to thinking in terms of images and references, dealing quickly with pictures becomes routine. Recurring images in particular are speedily filtered and actively overlooked like irritating advertisements. For people who spend most of their daily life online, images and videos with a low number of views or few responses take on a kind of precious significance.
Medjid Sopi (b. 1999) lives and works in Zurich. He has been operating the Instagram account @deathh420 since 2016. On it, he gives an impression of the dialectic that can be created by the treatment of found footage, employing unused and even indecent memes, as well as a celebration of exceptional internet personalities who either embrace being on display or subvert it due to their low reach. He shows what it is like to treat the internet like an archaeological site and, beyond the homogenized aesthetic, to consider images that do not meet mainstream criteria and thus are difficult to categorize, like valuable finds. His work illustrates his love for the ordinary and unconsidered as much as for the explicitly extravagant and exaggerated – a visual language that could only be born out of the globalized and everyday use of the internet.
Valentina Parati
SPOTTER
2022
The airport is a transitional space, where there are no social relations and nothing memorable happens, but it is a personal place characterized by a beautiful moment we have, alone with ourselves, just waiting. But there are also other areas: people are used to waiting outside in ‘’non-places’’ not unlike the airport, where they can observe and contemplate planes at close quarters: the SPOTTER AREAS. Almost as if we were outside a club/rave, four characters contemplate the distant sound of the airport (a club to go to or return from). We consider the nuances of, for example: of the dating place; a place to go to after a rave; or a place of contemplation. Finally, the spectator is left enveloped in sound.
Valentina Parati (b.1996, Italy) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lausanne. She is currently enrolled in the MA programme in Cinema at ECAL/HEAD. Her practice mainly tends towards the film format and video installation. The main focus of the works is the conception of noise music and club culture as a means of expression. Her approach to artistic production takes on the function of a DJ or conductor, as a role capable of transforming places: a constant mixtape, capable of activating orchestras, regardless of the ‘‘non-space’’.
Azize Ferizi
1637
2021
10 missing from 1637.
Po is in search of an invented memory. The missed acts push us to imagine sequences that vibrate now in our flesh. How can we build an approach anchored in the present, when our attention is focused on the doubt of an existence that seems to be from another spatio-temporal journey? The number of each passing second does not fill the lack of each missing person.
Today, 1637 families from Kosovo are still waiting for answers about their loved ones who are unaccounted for in connection with the 1998–1999 war and its aftermath. The postal code 1637 for Charmey, Fribourg is where the artist grew up and where Po was shot last summer.
Azize Ferizi (b.1996) currently lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Visual Arts Bachelor at HEAD – Genève. She is now completing her master’s degree at The School of Visual Arts, New York. Her main practices are painting, installations, and videos.
Azize Ferizi’s work has been shown in Voiture 14 (Marseille, FR), Waving Home at Limbo (Geneva, CH), Nour El Ain Karma International (Zurich, CH), Lemaniana at Centre d’art Contemporain (Geneva, CH), Kiefer Hablitzel Prize in Swiss Art Award (Basel, CH) and a solo show at Cherish in Geneva in 2020.