Annalena Müller

The Quest for Light

I never bought a protection case for my last smartphone, a very old model, which was kindly given to me second hand. Eventually, after three years, it suffered the same fate as most smartphones, I dropped it and the glass screen cracked. The phone still worked (!) but the display screen had since developed a rather quirky life of its own. A black matter began to eat its way from the corners to the centre of the screen, lined with a glowing fringe; iridescent pixel clouds would appear and disappear, depending on the temperature, the background image, and what buttons I pressed...
I took photos of the changing screen over the last year. The photos were the source of inspiration to make ''i-scapes''. They may be just a warm up for a bigger endeavour that is lurking in my mind, about technology eating us up, we will see...

All “i-scapes” were done on black, foldable cards, 114 x 162 mm, using nail polish, gel pens and glitter glue.

Fabian Bircher and I created this entry for the Mural-Competition, initiated by Hunziker-Areal in Zurich-Oerlikon in spring 2018. Our digital collage consists of motives central to the people living in this cooperative housing project; the apple-blossoms from the communal garden, round concrete-cones found on the playground, the silo, modern facades… we mashed them up into a multi-layered, colourful patchwork which represents the lifeliness of the area and its multi-facetted inhabitants.

In Spring 2016, Brassel Architects gave me the opportunity to design the 53 x 24  meter roof of the new wheel set bearing hall built for SBB (Swiss national railway service). My aim was to create a roof that stood out from other green roof designs visually, whilst fulfilling its purpose as an ecological compensation area. The percentages of gravel, deadwood, substrate and rocks that had to be used in the design were mimicking a dried river bed’s. Because of this riverscape-theme and the positioning of the SBB-Werkstätte on gravel of the river Limmat, my ideas flowed in an aquatic direction. Also, I wanted to create something that contrasted the rectangular geometry of the industrial terrain both graphically and in terms of colour. The shapes, as viewed from an aerial perspective, are inspired by the scales of the emperor angelfish (Pomacanthus imperator). Just as the angelfish's dark blue and white patterns morph into yellow and turquoise stripes as the fish transitions from its youth into its mature colouring, the dark-brown streaks on the roof will (fingers crossed!) transform into a yellowish-green as the planted weeds grow. This aquatic-inspired metamorphosis will continue perennially as the roof design blooms and retracts with the seasons. The roof can be seen from the train going out of Zurich main station on the „Durchmesserlinie“ in the direction of Olten/Bern. Look out the train window on your left-hand side!

I want to thank first of all Lukas Brassel for this great work opportunity, Regula Müller for sharing her invaluable expertise, the team from Tecton AG, Burim Shala, Andreas Meili and SBB. Thank you for all the support and the effort you put in. Also I want to thank Stefan Bürgi  for building up my courage to take on this project.

Installation with cherry blossoms, jars, liquid paraffin, fridge, LED-lights. 2013 and ongoing.

"There are flowers on my cherry tree! I will not let them fall, ever! We must put up a curtain all around them - that way the wind will not get at them!" the little Prince announced very proudly.
 

From: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler, New York 2001, p. 770.

The exhibition "InSightSeeing" was held at I:project space, 2nd - 25th of Octobre 2014. It was a collaboration between myself and the Artist Peter Zhang 耶 苏, who I met during my artist residency in Beijing. Peter and I each wrote an article about the other person's work in the show. Click here to read my English text on Peter Zhang's videos and here to read the very nice Chinese text Peter has written about my drawing on the wall and the installation with the chair in the middle. 
 

‘End of the Rainbow’ was set up on site during a month long artist residency at ‘Die Weinhalde’ in Küsnacht, Switzerland in 2014. I placed a light-based installation in the empty outdoor pool in the garden. The area around the pool, I cordoned off with a thick hemp rope, so the visitor could not see inside the pool, unless he stepped over the rope (which was easy to be done). The white sign, which mimicked Irish town signs, reads ‘End of the Rainbow’. As the sky became darker, the moving golden reflections became visible.

Painting has been declared "dead" since the invention of photography and many times after that in history. As a reaction to that, artists have been challenging the notion of what a painting entails through a self-reflecting practice of painting throughout the 20th century. Especially when industrial paint like acrylics were adopted to artistic production, it stretched the possibilities of what could be done with that material (as opposed to oil). My paintwork follows that strand of thought. Instead of covering surfaces with paint to create either the illusion of an image or simply to colour in an area, my aim is to create works that fall somewhere in between. Paint as a material is used as an indicator of a potential painting, becomes the figure itself with no ground or serves as a skin to cover a classic painting on canvas.

St. Ives is a small coastal town in the South-West of England. The light conditions there alternate between luminosity and gloominess which gives the place a mystic and enchanting atmosphere. When I visited St. Ives for the first time in 2008, I took a picture of what appeared to be an empty factory or storage building on Porthmeor beach. I found it fascinating that something like that existed right next to the Tate Museum and a popular local surfing spot. Ever since that visit, Porthmeor has lingered in the back of my mind.
In the summer of 2012, my friend Helen Hagenbuch and I were looking for a temporary space where we could work together. So I suggested that we travel to St. Ives to see if we could enter that building and use it as a temporary space.  It was Helens idea to sew a flag, which we intended to hoist on top of the building, once we were in it. That was our mission at the outset of this adventure.
The journey on which this idea and the flag have taken us surprised and challenged us each day. We felt like the protagonists in our very own adventure game. And we were winning each and every day.
It is hard to mediate this experience adequately through text or a website. The pictures shared here refer to some of the landmarks of our journey. Enjoy!

On the hillside below the Castle of Wädenswil lies an arboretum. This arboretum is home to a collection of over one hundred exotic trees from all over the world. Until 1987, it was used for botanical research; thereafter, it was meant to become a place for leisure and outdoor art installations. The people in charge of managing the arboretum, namely the association “Landart”,  was seeking an artistic concept which would upgrade the park both as a landart site and as a place for visitors to enjoy nature.
I noticed that a lot of trees in the park were not clearly labelled. The few existing tree tags featured the tree names only and were not common in style.
Therefore, I submitted a concept for tags with detailed illustrations of the specific feature of each tree.
I was commissioned to make 12 illustrated plates and was free to choose my drawing subjects. Each illustration is hand-drawn and consists of hundreds of dots of 0.1 mm diameter. The creation process is analogous to tattooing. The drawings were then scanned, printed on weatherproof foil, and mounted on aluminium plates. They were installed in the park for the exhibition "Unter Bäumen" in June 2012 and are now an enduring part of the arboretum.

The two little black books presented on the table were created in consecutive order. The illustrations, collage and texts in Book 1 follow a string of thoughts that ocurred towards the end of my studies at art school. In the first book, I reflected on the education I received, my opinions towards what I have learnt, on artistic practice and the insecurity that would follow graduation. Inside Book 2, the analytical process of the first book, which is asking more general questions, was reduced to the questioning of my sense of self, my self image and the image others may have of me. I photocopied a portrait of me (photographed by Goran Basic) and placed the copies onto the pages. Each picture underwent a form of manual manipulation and is accompanied by statements or juxtaposed with pencil drawings.

 

24 digital inkjet photo prints, 150 x 150 mm.
The work is based on the study of a family photo album from the 1960’s or 70’s. I picked it out of the private collection of Claudio Cavedon, who has archived over 2000 abandoned photo albums from charity shops, house clearings etc. I analysed the photographs as a means to tell stories and capture memories. The people in the pictures were strangers to me, I had no connection to the contents whatsoever.

I scanned some of the pictures, all of which were shot with a Kodak Instamatic camera, and removed the people from them in photoshop. I studied the emptied pictures, their mood, their composition.
Then I started to take pictures in my everyday surroundings, trying to capture the mood of the empty pictures. I covered a part of my digital compact camera’s display with opaque tape in order to get the square cropping of the original instamatic format. All of my photos are snapshots. They were neither staged or altered in photoshop subsequently.

'Family Album' was exhibited in the independent Diploma Exhibition, which was taking place parallel to the official Diploma Exhibitions in the main building of the ZHDK (Zürich University of the Arts). The exhibition in the halls of the freight Yard (Güterbahnhof) in Zürich has been initiated by about 40 graduate students, myself included, from all departments of the ZHDK. Because the school refused to provide an adequate space for the graduate exhibition, we set up our own, non-profit/no-budget protest graduate show.