BASEL.- The exhibition Home Is a Foreign Place at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G addresses the concept of home in various ways – as a feeling, a place, and an idea. It questions how our understanding of home evolves and how deeply it impacts human existence. The works are based on over ten years of intense research and artistic work, in which Knecht has consistently pursued her examination of themes like home, identity, and diversity. Home Is a Foreign Place represents the concentrated culmination of Sandra Knecht's practice and is her most extensive solo exhibition to date.

Sandra Knecht’s personal path to art, like her work, is unconventional. In 2011, she began studying visual art after spending over two decades working as a social worker. Her profession often brought her into the kitchens of the families she worked with, where they cooked together, exchanging culinary traditions and building bridges. These experiences continue to nourish her artistic practice. Knecht’s research is always long-term and materializes itself in various formats: installation, archive, photography, poetry, video, sound, performance, sculpture, and culinary art.

Living in Buus, a small village, where Knecht resides with herpartner and many animals, is inseparable from her artistic work. “All the plants and animals have at one point been integrated into artworks. They live here withus until they die,” says Knecht. These living beings are essential actors in her art. This coexistence with the animals in the village is her living studio, where art works are conceived and realized.

Home Is a Foreign Place is a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a total work of art that presents Knecht’s artistic practice in a multifaceted way, encouraging visitors to engage with both the foreign and the familiar within themselves.

Lukas Wassmann, in collaboration with Sandra Knecht, created a powerful series of portraits featuring 28 people from Sandra’s village, Buus, outside of Basel—individuals who shape her external sense of home—as well as friends and others she feels connected to through a shared sense of community and like-mindedness. Each protagonist wears a T-shirt or hoodie with the CHNÄCHT logo, co-designed with tattoo artist Ivo Habermacher, and shares a personal statement about what home means to them.

The series will be exhibited as part of Home Is a Foreign Place, contrasting Sandra's concept of an inner 'home'—her emotional and personal sense of belonging—with her outer reality, rooted in the physical and social fabric of living in the village.

In her artistic practice, Swiss artist Sandra Knecht (*1968 in Zurich, lives and works in Buus, Basel-Landschaft) explores the concept of home, delving into the unfamiliar aspects of the term. She traces her own family history and investigates the notion of home. Knecht’s long-term research unfolds through various media such as installation, archive, photography, video, sound, performance, and culinary art. Her multifaceted oeuvre is based on ten years of transdisciplinary research on the concept of home. In her work, the artist develops unique social sculptures, ranging from dinner parties and performance art to the conception and realization of artworks, exhibitions, and book projects.