Talk with the artist Vanessa Billy, with book launch

Vanessa Billy (*1978 in Geneva, lives in Zurich) has created a group of works for the Rehmann Museum using agricultural waste and technological materials to explore materiality and its vitality. She combines simple basic materials with products for the industrial production of electricity. By dissolving existing hierarchies between human and non-human actors in this way, she enables a new perspective on energy production and embodied knowledge. It thus focuses on the relationship between two actors (human/non-human) and creates an intra-action, as it were.
In addressing the question of electrical infrastructure in the region, it seeks a new view of the future, based on what is and with a focus on sustainability.

Website: https://vanessabilly.com

Yasmin Afschar, art historian and freelance curator, lives in Zurich. From 2018 to 2021 she worked as a curator at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, then temporarily managed the Mainz Kunsthalle and continues to co-run "Le Foyer - in Process" - a nomadic discussion platform with a focus on artistic processes.


Book launch of the exhibition publication
The publication is the third in the series "Contributions of the Rehmann Museum to Contemporary Sculpture". It documents the exhibition and is being produced in collaboration with Vanessa Billy, Brodie Ellis and the Paul Schatz Archive. The research-based and site-specific aspect of the exhibited works, several of which were created exclusively for this exhibition and for this location, becomes visible. The catalog makes the examination of technology and ecology accessible from the perspective of contemporary art.

The curator, Michael Hiltbrunner, explains the works of the individual artists, in particular their creative process and the historical aspects of Paul Schatz's works. The artistic works and the documents, objects and works by Paul Schatz discuss in their own way a possible "technology of the future". The author Heike Faller in ZEITmagazin explores the question of human hunger for energy and how this relates to the experimental-artistic and scientific approaches and to our future in concrete terms.

Before the talk, at 14:00-14:30, there will be a public guided tour by the curator of the Rehmann Museum, Michael Hiltbrunner.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.