WINTERTHUR.- The new One Another format sets up a lively dialogue between contemporary artists and works from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur – a collaborative exchange undertaken in a spirit of reciprocity. The title refers to encounters that give rise to a multilayered network of interrelationships, in which diversity and difference connect rather than divide.

The series opens with Kara Springer, who was born in Barbados in 1980 and grew up in Canada. Her multimedia work, which ranges from photography and sculpture to site- specific installations, deals with power structures and the constructedness of historical narratives. She frequently focuses on diasporic experiences and the interplay between human interventions in nature and the impact they have on us. Springer’s works are shown alongside a selection of pieces from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur that have a thematic or aesthetic resonance with them or where these two aspects intermesh. The exhibition includes eight artistic positions, chosen in close collaboration with Kara Springer.

The exhibition includes works from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur by Tacita Dean, John Divola, David Goldblatt, Roni Horn, Axel Hütte, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ricarda Roggan and Joel Sternfeld.

The mix of different perspectives and artistic approaches gives rise to a thematic thread that connects them and crystallises the key issue at stake: What paths bring us into relationship – both with one another and with our environment?

The artist Kara Springer (*1980), born in Barbados in the Caribbean, lives and works in New York and Toronto. In her multimedia practice – ranging from photography and sculpture to site-specific installations – she addresses structures of power, diasporic experiences, and the impact of human interventions in nature. Mountains – as places of refuge and resistance – play a particularly significant role in Springer’s work. Springer studied at the University of Toronto, ENSCI – Les Ateliers (Paris), and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University (Philadelphia). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA Toronto), Artists Space (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia), the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB), the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt am Main).

She is a graduate of the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was a fellow of the Core Residency Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Selected Works

Kara Springer: The Shape of Mountains, 2023

Kara Springer’s series The Shape of Mountains takes up her ongoing artistic exploration of mountains, which she conceives of as places of refuge and projections of possible futures. She spent part of 2022 in Switzerland, where she encountered the Alps for the first time, including the Rigi – known as the ‘Queen of the Mountains’ – the only massif in the country to be commonly gendered as feminine (die Rigi). Her experience there moved her to reflect on Jamaica’s mountains, which formed the backdrop of her mother’s childhood in Kingston, Jamaica. This work is born out of a reflection on the role of mountains in Jamaican colonial history: after Spanish rule ended and the British took possession of the island in 1655, the mountains offered the Maroons – communities of people of African descent who had escaped enslavement – a place of refuge where they could organise and enact their resistance.

Springer’s installation presents high resolution scans of repeatedly fired clay printed on Japanese rice paper. This allows the artist to draw attention to the structure of the earth – both mountains and clay are formed through processes within its outermost layer, the crust. In dialogue with the work of the artist Etel Adnan, Springer links mountains and spaceships, offering a view of a harsh and unknown world positioning the landscape as a site of estrangement and encounter.

The fragility of the rice paper set against the structure’s imposing scale becomes a metaphor for the tensions in society: the pull between stability and fragility, belonging and loss, home and flight, resistance and violence.

Kara Springer: I / must be given words, 2022

I / must be given words is the product of Kara Springer’s interest in clay, a material she experiments with in a variety of different ways. After many years spent experimenting with plaster – which the artist described as an ‘obsessive mapping of brokenness’, given the material’s intrinsic brittleness and fragility – her practice took a new turn with the introduction of clay. What had once been an allegory for confronting and reflecting on the violence of white institutional structures gave way to the possibility of shaping new structures and patterns of life, a shift embodied in the vitality and generative qualities of clay.

For this large-scale installation, she cast clay slabs, which she then fired and glazed before transferring close-up images of these ceramics onto the light box surfaces. She also uses high-resolution scans of her own skin that have undergone a simple colour inversion in which they are transformed into their opposite on the color spectrum, thus becoming these ocean-like shades of blue. The shifting brightness of the light boxes sets the images in motion, their luminosity synchronized to the rhythm of Springer’s breathing in real time. In this iteration, the rhythm of her breath has been captured and converted into a loop for the duration of the show. Her breath thus rises and falls across all the boxes at once as a unifying thread.

The title of the work is borrowed from the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Negus’. In his view, ‘creolisation’ symbolised the emergence of new cultures and languages from the blending of different influences – a creative, renitent force opposing the consequences of colonisation by European powers.

Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending, 2001

The 20 photogravures in the portfolio The Russian Ending depict dramatic events such as explosions, bomb blasts, burials, funerals and natural disasters. Tacita Dean (b. 1965) based her work on a collection of old postcards that she acquired from flea markets across Europe. The title refers to a film industry practice in early 20th century Denmark, whereby two alternative endings were shot for the films produced there in order to cater to the political and cultural beliefs of particular countries: this meant that for Russian audiences, the happy endings designed to appeal to the US market were replaced with tragic ones. The artist has annotated the pictures herself in white ink – fictional stage directions supplied by an imaginary woman director. This translates the documentary nature of the images into a fragmentary, ambiguous visual language hovering between fact and fiction.

The Russian Ending prompts us to reflect on the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the images, on the selective processes of memory, and on how collective events may be perceived and interpreted differently depending on the cultural context and the prevailing zeitgeist in which they occur.

David Goldblatt, Blue Asbestos fibres, Owendale Mine, Northern Cape, 26 October 2002, 2002

David Goldblatt’s (1930–2018) photographic projects focus on South Africa’s people, landscapes and power structures. The picture on display here is part of his Intersections series, which turns a critical eye to the after-effects of asbestos mining. Prompted by his long-standing interest in mining – informed by growing up in a mining town – and the loss of a friend who died of cancer caused by blue asbestos, Goldblatt examines the devastating impact that the mining industry has on local communities. The sheeny residues of blue asbestos fibres give an alluring appeal to the seemingly unspectacular image that contrasts with the toxic reality of a landscape etched with trauma. Goldblatt’s detailed captions indicate that we are looking at a heavily contaminated site that poses serious health risks. The camera’s proximity to the toxic material generates a sense of anxiety, which is intensified by the knowledge that it is found in the immediate vicinity of inhabited settlements. Verging on the dystopian, this landscape is a haunting indicator of the way capitalist uses of the land – marked by division, appropriation, exploitation and abuse – impact the human body and deplete nature, an echo, as Goldblatt says, of ‘how we have shaped it – and how it has shaped us’.

Joel Sternfeld, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979, 1979

Joel Sternfeld’s (b. 1944) series American Prospects (1978–1986) – which also includes the work After a Flash Flood – focuses on the relationship between humans and the landscape they have left their mark on. While classic landscape photography – as exemplified by Ansel Adams or Edward Weston – depicts nature as sublime and pristine, Sternfeld documents an ecologically stressed landscape that is increasingly exploited for economic gain. His critique of the American way of life delves into the latent tensions and violence lurking behind the deceptive utopian facades of rural life and suburban idylls.

When looked at more closely, there is something unsettling about carefully composed, seemingly unspectacular scenes like After a Flash Flood, which show influences from both 17th-century Dutch painting and the dramaturgy of cinema. The suburban house ‘hanging’ perilously above a landslide and the wreck of a car swallowed by the ground become metaphors for a society on the verge of collapse. The image captures the atmosphere of the late 1970s and 1980s when nuclear accidents, hostage-takings and fuel crises threatened imminent apocalypse – a feeling that persists today in the post- 9/11 and Covid era.