Catalogue > At random

« We do not have to know each other in advance » is a hybrid video work that alternates moments of dance performance with archive footage and textual quotations. Gabriela Löffel draws on the political aspect of public space to construct her thinking, developing a visual essay that stages the ‘performativity of bodies in this zone of political action’. Drawing on the written work of Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist who has worked on the question of the body and its normalised representativeness in contemporary society, Löffel gives corporeality to the issues raised by the author. Quotations from Butler's work are shown alongside the danced and archival elements of the video. The almost fixed camera allows us to examine in detail the slow, precise movements of the dancers. The camera's movements are almost imperceptible, so subtle are they. The artist and choreographer Cédric Gagneur worked closely together to define the various movements that make up the choreography: they propose an abstraction of gestures of resistance or revolt, drawn from archive images from the collection of the Archives contestataires de Genève. The piece is inhabited by slowness and silence, giving the body enough space to unfold individually or collectively. The work offers a dialectic of the potential for protest in the public space. Co-produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain and the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève for the Mire program.

Gabriela Löffel mainly works with time-based media and focuses on the zones of political and finance structures, and infrastructures. Shifting and translating from the documented immediate to the fields of interpretation and mise-en-scène are strategies she uses in her work process. A method that often results in long-term projects and enables her to create spaces for questions and to propose disruptions to linear narratives. She is interested in the obliquity of the subject and his context. It’s in this gap, brought about by her way of addressing subjects, that her work opens onto reflections on the sense of how we understand a world when we become conscious of the fragmentation of our knowledge. Her work has been presented at institutions and galleries including MAST Bologna, Aargauer Kunsthaus, EMAF Osnabrück, Galería Metropolitana Santiago, Dazibao Montreal, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale among others. Gabriela Löffel is a recipient of the Swiss Art Award, the Lewis Baltz Research Fund, the Landis+Gyr Grant, as well as others.