Solo Exhibition, Kunsthalle Palazzo (2022)


                                                 Exhibition tour

The exhibition in the fall of 2022 at Kunsthalle Palazzo was dedicated to the artist Sonja Feldmeier. She works with media such as painting, sculpture, video and audio and combines these different approaches to create complex installative works. Numerous journeys have taken Sonja Feldmeier to the most diverse parts of the world. These adventurous experiences have always led to new inspiration and new works. In the process, she develops groups of works that are constantly growing and being added to. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Palazzo is dedicated to the work complex "Based on a True Story", which has developed over many years and is now being shown in its entirety for the first time. The basis for this was video recordings made during a trip to India. Over the course of several days, Sonja Feldmeier documented the felling of a monumental sacred tree that had to make way for the construction of a pilgrimage road. In the process, an intimate portrait of the local workers and this extraordinary felling process was created with rudimentary means. From these photographs and from synesthetic experiences, colorful paintings as well as sculptures were created in the following years, which are directly related to the film. Many works were created especially for this exhibition. 
2021 | Solo exhibition Kunsthalle Vebikus






On the ground lies a gigantic anchor on a thick cable, from a distance it resembles a bone. The anchor cable leads upwards, wraps itself around the steel girders of the ceiling construction and becomes thinner and thinner along the way, becoming first a rope, then a cord. Finally, it is reduced to just a thread attached to three white balloons. The heavy anchor holds only a little air, a gossamer nothingness - here, too, we see a striking visual contradiction: the great promise of material support that in the end evaporates into nothingness.
But where are we? Are we on the lower deck of a ship? The spiral staircase leading upwards is dressed up like a vaudeville dancer, adorned with glittering tinsel. A dazzling invitation: This way to the party, lucky you! But have we even been invited? Or is the party possibly already over? In the ambivalence of the space in between, Sonja Feldmeier asks existential questions to which there are no clear answers. (Sibylle Ryser)

2020 | Series of objects 



Exhibitions
2018 Auswahl 18 Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau
2018 34. KANTONALE JAHRESAUSSTELLUNG, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn
2018 Songlines, M54, Basel

2020 |Sculpture 

In the church Nossa Dona, Feldmeier shows Coming Home, a work from the group of works called Home from Home, in which she explores ambivalent aspects of the theme of home. Coming Home, like its sister work Breaking Home, is an oversized flute, but, provided sufficient lung volume, this one is at least theoretically playable. The flute was made out of a tree trunk that was torn out along with its roots. The trunk ends in a mouthpiece. Between the mouthpiece and the roots the bark platelets are partially colored with pink forestry markings. Around the mouthpiece the color dominates, before it gradually decreases towards the roots. The luminous color emphasizes the tension between the two opposing forces in the work: The uprooting of the tree signals a raw energy such as can be found in nature. The processing and transformation of the natural material 'tree' into a flute on the other hand points to human craft and the fact that man appropriates nature in order to establish a home or a native land for himself. Because: Home is not only fixed, but can also be created by people settling in a place and filling it with experiences. Nevertheless, this creation of home can only succeed under favorable conditions - the fact that home also has a violent component becomes clear when people are denied the opportunity to acquire a new home or to reappropriate it. The roots floating in space condense this paradigmatically: the uprooting suggests homelessness, but nevertheless the tree at least theoretically retains the possibility to take roots somewhere again - even if it is in the air. (Sarah Wiesendanger)



Exhibitions
2020 Biennale Bregaglia, Nossa Dona
2020 36. Kantonale Jahresausstellung | Kunstmuseum Solothurn

 




2020 | Sculpture


Upon entering the usually locked room in the Baseltor, a tree awaits the visitor. It is mounted horizontally in the room, along with its roots. The hollowed out and decorated tree is perforated to form a flute. The artist had a spruce taken out of the ground in such a way that the root system remained largely intact. The tree is hollowed out and equipped with holes like a flute. Carvings create finely worked out parts on the one hand, yet the trunk remains raw in certain places. This tree sculpture hangs in the center of the room in the Baseltor. The artist thus transforms the tree into an irritating object between flute and battering ram. (Anna Bürkli)

Exhibitions
2020 Zart 2020, Solothurn 

2019/20 | Audio installation as a recess gong for the Looren school campus in Zürich (Witikon)



In her contribution called „Kaleidophone" Sonja Feldmeier installs a sound sculpture on the Looren school grounds as a signal for recess. At the beginning and end of the breaks, the entire school area is transformed into a spatially immersive world of sound. The buildings are used as instruments as well as entities for reflection and resonance. Different sound intervals are heard throughout the area, staggered in time and space, which call upon the students to go out for recess and then accompany them back in with gesture akin to strokes of wings.

To create the compositional concept the artist worked together with composer and sound designer Vojislav Anicic. In two weeks, sounds of everyday school life were indentified and recorded together with interested students and teachers. Pencil tips, leafing through books, ball games, the noises of writing or stampeding sneakers were combined into rhythms in the recording studio and accompanied with sounds and melodies played by professional musicians. (Katharina Dunst)




2020 | Film (25 minutes)



Travelling alone through Northern India, Sonia Feldmeier witnesses the spectacular felling of a tree: An ancient, holy PEEPUL TREE is being cut down by seven lumbermen using handsaws and axes. Over the course of several days, she films their undertaking. She is in the thick of the activity, the language barrier however impedes verbal communication. From this subjective experience she creates audio portraits, which provide each lumberjack with their own individual musical presence in the film.


>> Link publication "based on a true story"

Festivals
Vienna Shorts 2020, International competition, Welt Premiere, 2020
Delhi Shorts International Film Festival 2020, International competition and Indian Premiere (Special Mention)
Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media, International competition 2020, Team-Work-Award 2021 ex-aequo
Festival du Film court en Plein air de Grenoble, International competition, 2020
Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, Alchimistes competition, 2020
Tamil Nadu Film Festival, International competition, 2020
BOGOSHORTS, Collections Competition 2020
Festival International du Court Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand, International competition, 2020
Tokyo International Short Film Festival, International competition, 2021
OFF – Odense International Film Festival, 2021
Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), 2021
Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, 2021

Technical Details
Genre Essayistic Documentary
Duration 25 Min 13 Sec
Language No Dialogs
Image Digital Video, DCP
Sound 5.1 Mix
Country, Year Switzerland, 2020

Crew
Director, Camera, Sound Sonja Feldmeier
Editing Sonja Feldmeier, Thomas Isler
Music, Sounddesign VOYA, Sonja Feldmeier
Rerecording Sound Mix VOYA
Producer, artistic consultant Stella Händler



2016-2022 | Series of large-format paintings, audio compositions


The Peepul series is part of the complex of works based on a true story

With the series The Peepul, Sonja Feldmeier presents new, unconventional pictorial inventions. In undefined spaces, biomorphic figurations leave neon-colored traces; embers glow and sparkle in front of flickering star clusters framed by ornamental nerve bundles. The large-format pictures present themselves to us as autonomous works. Yet also they are part of a complex of works called based on a true story, which also includes the short film The Peepul Tree.

The background of this group of works, which reaches far into different realms of content and media, is Sonja Feldmeier's journey to the Himalayas. In the North Indian city of Haridwar she witnesses a spectacular tree felling. The artist stays on site for a week, recording the strange, disconcerting event with her video camera. She travels alone, verbal communication with the tree fellers is not possible. With this material Sonja Feldmeier first works on a cinematic realization. As an echo of the situation and her experiences on site, she creates sound portraits of all the actors in the action together with the film composer Vojislav Anicic, thus giving them a non-linguistic, individual presence.

In the darkroom of the artistic process, her work on The Peepul Tree develops and branches out into the three-dimensional and painterly. For the first time, Sonja Feldmeier uses synaesthetic perception as a direct resource for her artistic work. The artist dedicates herself intensively to the color-spatial echoes that a counterpart awakens in her. By focusing on the fluid, fleeting character of the synaesthetic impression, she develops visual "portraits" of the protagonists of the event. With The Peepul she creates, as it were, „introspective views" of the protagonists of The Peepul Tree. In this way Sonja Feldmeier finds adequate forms for an experience in which inner and outer images fade into each other. (Sibylle Ryser)

>> Link publication "based on a true story"
>> Links The Peepul Tree, Kompositionen (audio):
1. Iltab
2. Bablu
3. Pinstripe

2015 | Art-in-Architecture, Youth center „WERKK“, reconstruction of the Old Forge, Baden, Switzerland

Young people have always made efforts in playing an almost acrobatic seeming game of differentiation and affiliation. Thereby, logos, labels and symbols of different kind and origin are of central interest. A big part of these icons is inspired by existing animals (logos such as La Coste, Puma, Mammut etc)

For the research on this project I focussed on the popular world of icons of the youth culture at the time when the „Old Forge“ was built. At the beginning of the 20th century, the movement of aesthetical and philosophical importance emphasis on youth: Art Nouveau was trying to join art and popular culture. In this world of images I have often found illustrations of butterflies, an animal that is associated with youth that symbolizes transformation and metamorphose. Far beyond these traditional significations I believe that the butterfly is an appropriate totem animal for youth: with his dazzling beauty and signal-effect pattern it pursues strategies of camouflage, mimicry and deterrence in defence of its fragile constitution.  

On the new tower two amorphous forms oscillate. The objects are inspired by the pattern of the butterfly’s wings that irritates pursuers: the vexing eyespots pretend a taller animal. In a more abstract form and in a much bigger scale this twinkling eyes are an enigmatic emblem for the new Youth Cultural Centre, seen from afar and creating memorable identity, mirroring with a twinkle in the eye the youth behavioural patterns of mimicry/imitation and juvenile delimitation.

Thousands of metallic-reflecting sequins compose the two twinkling forms. Each breeze moves the small PVC-pads slightly producing a vivid sparkling effect. The visible part of the structural frame is similar to modern billboard-supports, refers to the ceiling construction of the „Old  Forge“ and extends the architecture of the tower. The steel structure and the delicately sparkling surface of the two emblems contrast dynamically.






2013/2008 | sculpture

Sleeping Tree exists in various versions. It first manifested itself as an ice sculpture in the park of a stately historic villa.Over the duration of the exhibition, the sculpture melted, leaving behind a circular pond.

A second version is made of black epoxy resin, semi-naturalistic, semi-alien. The life-sized tree, growing down into the earth through itself, as it were - «half tree stump, half volcanic crater» (Claudia Spinelli) - was on view in various outdoor settings. A version as a bronze sculpture, embedded in a planted environment, is being planned. link Sleeping Tree #2

Exhibitions
2021 Vorüber_Gehend Idylle und Künstlichkeit
2013 100 Jahre Meret Oppenheim, Park beim St. Alban-Tor, Basel
2013 Froh Ussicht, Samstagern
2008 Glänz, Kulturförderpreis der Alexander Clavel-Stiftung, Villa Wenkenhof, Riehen/Basel

2012 | Synchronous five-channel HD video installation with sound


At the end of 2011, Sonja Feldmeier filmed during several weeks in the vicinity of an Indian railroad from the British colonial era. On a single track, the narrow-gauge railroad handles the entire passenger traffic from Kalka to Shimla in the Himalayas. This footage is the source material for the video installation Kalka-Shimla-Diaries. The train operators' meticulously observed schedule serves as the framework for the five synchronously projected videos. The documentary narrative structure is fictionally interwoven with everyday small stories. They show simultaneous actions at different locations and from different perspectives. 

Exhibitions
2013 Auswahl 13, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau
2012 Einzelausstellung im Bahnmuseum Albula in Bergün

Text
Juri Steiner, hall text (download)

Award
Werkbeitrag, Aargauer Kuratorium, 2013

1999 | series of objects (airbrush and artificial fur).





«The thing looks like a giant button, glinting wet, soft and limp. It could be a sexual organ, a kind of Japanese candy, an organic gemstone, or a thing to be swallowed, embedded in crumpled furry textile. 
As a participant in Sonja Feldmeier's fictions, I am brought into a world that consists of elements of the macro world blown up into large-scale, combined with everyday objects and materials. The latter, with their softness and comfort, provide a general sense of well-being in the environment. In contrast, the pictorial objects are ambivalent, a mixture of enticement and danger.» (Daniel Meier)

« Darlingtoniaalso plays with short and long-sightedness. Seen from a distance, the sculptured elements covered with artificial fur seem to be some monstrous living thing growing in the room. On closer inspection, the motifs of the airbrush-treated polyester objects, buried deep inside the fabric bodies, exude a fascination of their own. Despite their hyper-realistic presentation, the actual inspiration and subject of this piece—magnified photographs of bitten fruit—is barely recognizable. The changed size of things, the lack of context and the density of visual detail create a structure which is entirely open to reinterpretation. Viewers resemble animals trapped in the vortex of the eponymous carnivorous plant as they are slung into the jungle of free association named Darlingtonia.» (Nina Güllicher)

Exhibitions

2001 Swiss Art Awards, Basel
1999 Jahresausstellung, Kunsthaus Aarau
1999 Darlingtonia, poste d’art contemporain, Fribourg
1999 Melted, Horten, Düsseldorf

1999 | Series of large-format airbrush paintings.



«We can hardly be closer to a person, and yet we are infinitely far away: although we recognize all the veins and fibers of the iris abundantly clear, look far into the bottomless black of the pupil, but we do not see our counterpart, on the contrary. Although eyes of very specific people are depicted, the images paradoxically lead away from the individual and end in the idea of elementary energies: The structures of the iris can be read not only as details of a human eye, but also as flowing water, flickering fire, magical aurora, or eruptions of the sun. (...) The person evaporates: individual and cosmos flow into one another almost indistinguishably. A surprising metaphor for infinity - even after 15 years.» (Markus Stegmann)

Exhibitions

2013 Lapilli, John Schmid Galerie, Basel
2000 Painterly. The 11th Vilnius Painting Triennial, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius
1999 Silberfisch, kleines Helmhaus, Zürich
1999 Gisela Bullacher, Sonja Feldmeier, Inge Krause, Bernhard Suhr: Malerei und Fotografie, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz

Text
Markus Stegmann, Kunstbulletin 11/2013 (download)

2000 | Series of large-format posters, stage installation with shortened chairs. The piezo prints are autonomous works, but are also shown in an installation setting with the stage.

Phantom 00was created in collaboration with people of different ages, backgrounds, cultural and social affiliations. Fans were asked to describe the face of their idol from their imagination.

A digital photo archive, which the police use to produce phantom images, served as the source material. The faces were drawn and modeled until the descriptors were satisfied with the portrait of their idol.

«Basel artist Sonja Feldmeier’s Phantom 00 is a series of large format posters created with an advanced FBI drawing device that renders, step by step, a person’s mental picture of someone else into portrait form. Replacing the eye witness with various individuals from all walks of life, and an FBI staffer with herself, the artist moves an advanced technology normally devoid of artistic functions into the realm of art practice.» (Julie Dreamer)



Exhibitions

2002 1:1 Wrong Time Wrong Place #4, Espace d’art contemporain (les halles), Porrentruy
2001 Out of Bounds, Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles
2000 Phantom 00, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau
2000 |Sculpture, Tiergarten, Berlin




«In Hold the Line, the artist transposes her way of creating installations into an urban situation. A few meters from a public phone box, she has built a bench out of thickly bundled, multicolored telecommunication and data transmission cabling.This bare jumble of material destroys any illusion that the transmission of data is an essentially immaterial operation. The bench is on the edge of a vast and busy road, streaming with buses, trams, cars and other forms of transport which characterize a metropolis. The fleetingly ephemeral, hardly tangible essence of this flurry of media is underlined by the presence of phone boxes and letter boxes. Located squarely at the bus stop, the bench offers a seat for those waiting for the bus and a brief interface in the traffic of data and people in a city.» (Nina Güllicher)

Exhibition
2000 Satellit, Z 2000, Berlin-Pavillon, Berlin

2004 | series of photographs



«In Iconoclastic Digestion Systems, a dog named Burned Bacon, two wild boars named Lord and Esmeralda, and a white stag come to the artist's aid to take down Hitler, Stalin, and the Pope, respectively.

In visible aggressiveness, rapid approach, and tentative scrutiny, the hungry contestants approach the masterminds of political and ecclesiastical power in their enclosures - and in the photographic moment unwittingly become iconoclastic players in Feldmeier's experimental arrangement.» (Isabel Zürcher)

«One has rarely seen dictators, leaders, and icons of any stripe fail as grotesquely, ravenously funny, and macabrely as in Sonja Feldmeier's photographic works. The Swiss artist, who always works conceptually, has arranged all kinds of vegetables, fruit, and meat scraps, bread and rolls, country choppers, and pig snouts into small sculptures that bear a striking resemblance to their models, only to then literally throw them to a hungry mob. The fact that Feldmeier's sarcastically and aptly titled photo series Iconoclastic Digestion Systemsis by no means limited to the symbolic feeding of historical villains may irritate more sensitive minds, but it is the actual provocative appeal of the works. The artist is interested in far more than just individuals, but rather in belief systems in the broader sense, in the relationship between mass and power, in symbols and icons, their identity-forming power and their end.» (Christoph Schütte, FAZ)



Exhibitions

2011 Festival der Tiere, Museum Essl, Klosterneuburg bei Wien
2009 modellhaft, Kunstraum Riehen, Riehen
2006 Il museo insostenibile, Spazio Culturale La Rada, Locarno
2005 Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt
2004 Animal Destinies, Goliath Visual Space, New York
2004 from White to Wild, White Space, Zürich

Artworks from the Iconoclastic Digestion Systems series are in the following collections: Essl Museum Klosterneuburg near Vienna and Sammlung Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt
2007 | Magazin-Objekt






Aus Pressefotos aus der Zeit des Irak-Kriegs (2003–2007) werden jegliche Akteure spurlos wegretouchiert. Die unveränderten Bildlegenden bleiben erhalten und weisen auf den ursprünglichen Bildinhalt hin.

«Die in Zeiten weltweiter Migrationsbewegungen häufig zitierte Ausweisung überträgt Sonja Feldmeier in evacuated auf ihr bildnerisches Verfahren. Aus 24 Fotografien, die alle der Berichterstattung aus dem Irakkrieg entstammen, ‹evakuierte› sie die menschlichen Figuren. ‹Bergung eines sterbenden Journalisten durch US-Soldaten›; ‹Anti-Kriegs-Demonstration im kalifornischen Point Reyes›; ‹Irakische Soldaten ergeben sich US-Truppen›: Während die Bildlegenden am Anlass der Aufnahme festhalten, fügen digitale Retouchen den Landschaftsausschnitten geheimnisvolle, ja malerisch anmutende Unschärfen hinzu. Dass die originalen Lambda-Prints als Magazin für Fr. 10.00 erhältlich sind, ist Programm. Es führt sie zurück an den ersten Ort ihrer Rezeption und spitzt die inhaltliche Verschiebung noch einmal zu.» (Isabel Zürcher)

«Die Frage, bis wohin Fotografien Zeugnisse der Realität sind, die sie abbilden, und von welchem Punkt an sie zum Abbild subjektiver Stellungnahmen zu dieser Realität werden, ist nicht leicht zu beantworten. Unbestreitbar hingegen ist, dass die Art der Veröffentlichung für ihre Rezeption eine entscheidende Rolle spielt. Layout, Bildlegenden und Kommentare inszenieren Ereignisse und manipulieren das vermittelte Wissen über die dargestellten Zusammenhänge – was während des Irak-Krieges erstmals und in erstaunlicher Unverfrorenheit öffentlich gezeigt wurde anhand der in die Truppen ‹eingebetteten› Reporter. Das dargebotene Spektakel wird in der Regel als Berichterstattung gesehen, obwohl der Sinn von Spektakeln an sich in der Ablenkung von der Realität liegt. (...)

Abstraktion durch Extraktion – so könnte man den Eingriff, den Sonja Feldmeier an den Aktualitätsbildern vornimmt, auf eine kurze Formel bringen. (...) Die entleerten Kulissen der Evacuated-Bilder appellieren an unseren horror vacui; wir projizieren unsere Vorstellung vom kommentierten Geschehen in die Bilder und sehen uns mit der Tatsache konfrontiert, dass niemand uns die Verantwortung für die eigenen Vorstellungen abnehmen kann. Dafür öffnet sich ein eigener Zugang zur Erkundung des vorgefertigten Produkts, das uns als Realität verkauft worden ist. Uns liegt immer noch ein präpariertes Bild vor, aber eines, das die Möglichkeit zu neuen Erkenntnissen eröffnet.» (Pierre-André Lienhard)

Ausstellungen

2001 Sammlungspräsentation, Museum für Kommunikation, Bern
2006 Evacuated, Seifenfabrik, Basel
2006 Dark Angel, Galerie Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden
2005 Feedback, o.T. Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Luzern

Eine Serie Evacuated befindet sich in der Sammlung des Museum für Kommunikation Bern.

Text
Pierre-André Lienhard, Bemerkungen zur Bilderserie Evacuated von Sonja Feldmeier (download)
2007/2005 serie of art prints

In press photos from the time of the Iraq war (2003-2007) any actors are removed without a trace. The unaltered captions remain and point to the original content of the picture.

«Sonja Feldmeier transfers the process of expulsion frequently cited in times of global migration movements to her pictorial process. She ‹evacuated› the human figures from 24 photographs, all of which were taken from reports on the Iraq war. ‹Recovery of a dying journalist by US soldiers›; ‹Antiwar demonstration in Point Reyes, California›; ‹Iraqi soldiers surrender to US troops›: While the captions stick to the occasion of the photograph, digital retouching adds mysterious, even painterly blurs to the landscape details. The fact that the original Lambda prints are available as a magazine for CHF 10.00 is programmatic. It takes them back to the first place of their reception and once again sharpens the shift in content.» (Isabel Zürcher) 

«The question of up to what point photographs are testimonies to the reality they depict, and from what point on they become a reflection of subjective opinions on this reality, is not easy to answer. What is indisputable, however, is that the manner of publication plays a decisive role in their reception. Layout, captions and commentaries stage events and manipulate the knowledge conveyed about the depicted contexts - something that was publicly demonstrated for the first time and with astonishing brazenness during the Iraq war by means of the reporters ‹embedded› in the troops. The spectacle presented is usually seen as journalism, although the point of spectacle itself is to distract from reality. (...) 

Abstraction through extraction - this is how the intervention that Sonja Feldmeier performs on the actuality images might be reduced to a short formula. (...) The emptied backdrops of the images in Evacuatedappeal to our horror vacui; we project our idea of the annotated events into the images and are confronted with the fact that no one can relieve us of the responsibility for our own ideas. In return, our own access to the exploration of the prefabricated product that has been sold to us as reality opens up. We are still presented with a prepared image, but one that opens up the possibility of new insights.» (Pierre-André Lienhard)

Exhibitions
2001 Sammlungspräsentation, Museum für Kommunikation, Bern
2006 Evacuated, Seifenfabrik, Basel 
2006 Dark Angel, Galerie Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden 
2005 Feedback, o.T. Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Luzern

A series Evacuated is in the collection of the Museum of Communication Bern.


2007/2006 | video installation in two versions (outdoor, 2006 / indoor, 2007)



Skyliner exists in two versions, one for the outdoor space, the other for the indoor space, in each of which the viewing perspective is rotated by 180°.

In the outdoor installation, one views the video from the outside looking into the enclosure; in the exhibition space, the viewers find themselves inside a structure and look out of the opening at a video projection that fills the room.

«The Skyliner is an alien appendage on the rocky outcrop. It seems to be ‹docked› to the massive rock, at the foot of the castle, much like a spacecraft. Inside the box, the viewer looks through the pupil-like opening onto a television set, which is slightly turned away from him and suggests the inhabitant watching. The running video is about the long journey of a snail on the globe. Crawling and scanning the various countries with its feelers, it moves steadily, modeling the
traversed globe on its snail shell, in which it finally retreats exhausted into its own world, having reached the North Pole." (Bernd Ruzicska)

«Finally, the viewer has to crawl through an increasingly dense enclosure of wooden flotsam, in order to observe from there - the situation is somewhat reminiscent of a trench - after a video zoom through space, a snail that slowly leaves its slimy trail on a globe to the music of Depeche Mode's ‹In your Room› - gradually absorbing the spherical object. [...] Camouflage and appropriation, territorialization, colonization and globalization are just some of the associations that are playfully visualized here - and ultimately lead to the media overload of the animal performer.» (Eva Scharrer)


Exhibitions
2007 Lost Call, Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel (indoor)
2006 Kunst am Schlossberg Lenzburg, Lenzburg (outdoor)
2006 Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz
2008/2001 | video installation



«For Pot Luck(2001), Sonja Feldmeier asks strangers to recreate the topography of their homeland with their favorite food and to comment on the process.

The video shows people who devote themselves entirely to this task - the memory of their homeland is combined with a childlike desire to play with food. In an act of communication, the protagonists bring their remembered, internal image of home into an external form, which they finally internalize again by eating up the food landscape. The humorous sequences tell of great themes with playful ease: of travel, migration and home, of the construction of memory, the search for identity and self-discovery, of the euphoria of departure, of homesickness and mourning.» (Sibylle Ryser) 

«In Pot Luck we see a succession of people who have lost themselves in the task Feldmeier has set them. Asked to ‹play with their food›, the strangers have become surprisingly child-like, free and creative.» (Angela Kingston)


Exhibitions

2008 Art with Strangers, Turnpike Gallery, Leigh
2006 Re_dis_trans: Voltage of Relocation and Displacement, apexart, New York
2001 Swiss Art Awards, Messe Basel

Award
Werkbeitrag, Aargauer Kuratorium, 2011

2007/2008 | Installative work complex, consisting of: My Way(sound installation), Bird Chat(video installation), Live(installation), In Your Room(video installation).



«Sonja Feldmeier has set up a world in the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen that only dreamscapes can produce. With rusty ceiling supports, the artist lets a forest grow into the rooms.

This makeshift version of life that the labyrinthine prop installation traces continues in various nest formations: a sleeping camp, wool blankets everywhere, an animal nest in the smashed monitor. The atmospheric warmth gives the impression of body temperature in a secret lair.

Scraps of Frank Sinatra's ‹My Way› crumble in karaoke fashion from the dug-up rootstocks. The certainty of the right path and the experiences of hesitation and doubt, experimentation and erring stake out a tense framework.

Like mushroomy outgrowths, monitors are mounted in the frame, along with a satellite dish. People communicate through short messages to evade their loneliness. Simultaneously protected and locked away, a video clip is projected on the back wall of a stage-like barrier, bringing together seemingly contradictory poles. A woman, complete with drums and wrapped in a burqa except for her eyes, beats a jerking rhythm on the drums (composition: Pia Vonarburg) following the initially quiet parts of the image. East and West, oppression and self-determination find each other in a somnambulistic way and in a visionary freedom from values.

Sonja Feldmeier collects in the collective picture archive of world events and assembles the finds isolated from their respective contexts into new stories. Signs and clues condense in Inhale Exhaleinto complex metaphors and powerful images of identity and power construction.» (Ursula Badrutt Schoch) 

«With Inhale ExhaleSonja Feldmeier builds a nested complex consisting of an associative field - in the form of a metaphorical forest - and several autonomous works. The installative context allows the visitor to establish loose relationships between the works and also to sever again. With her approach, the artist alludes to communicative processes that, because of their open and always individual structure, never proceed in a linear fashion, but rather contribute to the formation of identities and role models via twists and turns and past abysses. Contrary to widespread opinion, Sonja Feldmeier shows that identities and role images may have outwardly stable forms, but that their substantial core is always changeable and reshapeable.» (Stefan Wagner)



Exhibition:

2007 Inhale Exhale, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen

see also In Your Room

Text
Stefan Wagner, Embedded (download)
2010 | Video


«Real India is a video of Sonja Feldmeier’s exploration of a new, modern, urban environment – New Delhi, India – from the perspective of a stranger. Her journey begins with the climbing of a tree, from where she begins to collect unrelated images from her new surroundings and associates them with what she already knows.

Images of a tree, leaves, wires, animals, rituals, are transformed by the artist to follow a circular narrative through which she searches for understanding of New Delhi, while a man’s voice off-screen tells her that what she sees is not the real India, and that what she’s looking for is found somewhere else.» (Kyoung Park)

Exhibitions / Screenings
2010 Real India, Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi
2010 radikal subjektiv – Regionale 11, Kunstmuseum Baselland
2011 | Mixed Media Installation



«Here, a meteorite has obviously struck the earth - in a large crater lies an extraterrestrial object of considerable size and weight. Its gently rounded form is tattooed with ornamental flower and cloud patterns of Asian origin. The painting gives the porphyry a lively corporeality, it seems threatening and attractive at the same time. An enigmatic body, plunged into our world from an unknown outside.» (Sibylle Ryser)

Exhibition
2011 Art en plein air, Môtiers
2005-2012 | complex of works of paintings; plaster models, video


«The fictional landscapes are mental topographies, both strange and familiar, which can be reoccupied - even if they still retain their political and postcolonial relationships due to the highly charged patterns employed.« (Eva Scharrer)

Meters behind sea level defines a fictional space comparable to the myth of the sunken city of Atlantis, whose physical disappearance has made room for its resurrection in fiction. The space is defined by images whose model character denies the viewer the possibility of an everyday interpretation and shorthand classification because what is visible does not readily correspond to what is expected. (Barbara Reber)

Meters behind sea level is a group of works in which I develop different formats based on military camouflage patterns, which are shown in an installative context. 

Starting from military camouflage patterns of individual countries, I develop fictitious maps. In a multi-stage process, the reduced features of imitated flora and geology are given the characteristics of a cartographic representation.

Exhibitions
2014 Collecting. Umgang mit Sammlungen, Kunstmuseum Baselland
2012 Ernte – Kunstankäufe des Kantons Basel-Landschaft, Kunstmuseum Baselland
2009 Three leap seconds later, Kunsthaus Grenchen, Grenchen
2007 Lost Call, Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel
2006 Repatriated Territories, Spazio Culturale La Rada, Locarno
2006 Galerie Ruzicska/Weiss, Düsseldorf
2006 Dark Angel, Galerie Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden
2006 Von Erde schöner, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck
2006 emerging artists 06: Schweiz, Sammlung Essl, Wien
2005 Meter hinter dem Meeresspiegel, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt

Works from the group of works Meter hinter dem Meeresspiegel are in the following collections: Kunstsammlung des Bundesamt für Kultur, Sammlung Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Sammlung Kunstkredit, Museum.BL des Kantons Basel-Landschaft

Text
Barbara Reber, Landkarten des Ungesehenen (download)
Barbara Reber, Maps of the unseen (download)
Eva Scharrer, Kunstbulletin 4/07 (download)

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