Fischbau Ingrid Käser und Katrin Hotz

Since November 1999 the two Glarus artists Ingrid Käser (b 1976 in Glarus, lives and works in Glarus)  and Katrin Hotz (b 1976 in Glarus, lives and works in Glarus), who were born just one day apart on June 23 and on June 22, 1976, have been working on the project entitled Fish Cultivation. Both artists are currently enrolled at the F+F School of Art in Zurich, but have already distinguished themselves over the course of the past year in a series of group and solo exhibits.

Ingrid Käser and Katrin Hotz are intensively engaged in the medium of drawing. Their autonomously produced narrative drawings, making use of both abstract and tangible form vocabulary, as well as their jointly produced videos, photographs, and sculptures, trigger their collaboration in combining these elements with the intention of initiating new artistic formations and experiences. “Our Fish Cultivation Project . . . deals with the installation of drawings on the one hand and photography and film on the other. The essence of our joint drawing activity is the assembling and combining of our individual materials produced independently of the project. The encounter between the two bodies of work results in a fragmentation of our own work on the one hand but on the other hand shows it in a new context promising fresh interpretative possibilities.”
In the center of the fish cultivation project stand the directness of processes and the convergence, the collage effect, and the transformation of relationships and formulations impacting the every day as well as the field of art. Consequently, Ingrid Käser and Katrin Hotz choose “sets” reflecting not only metropolitan daily life but also natural areas, or the sphere of art exhibits as “background” for the treatment in their drawings, videos, photographs, and sculptures, where they superimpose the role of producers upon the role of observers.
For their exhibits they utilize afresh the tension between direct relationship and multiple superimposing media dissemination as a staged environment for the observer.

In the ground-floor areas of the Art Museum, they lead the public by means of a red plank carpet into the darkened room and the physical proximity to the projection of their new video, in which both artists – with Zarah Leander providing the background – frisk around in the snow in sentimental folly dressed in summer clothes. Simultaneously, a series of more than 40 individual slide pictures are dually projected in conjunction with two installations. In the next room the viewer, comfortably seated on a revolving chair, is enticed into enjoying an installation of drawings arranged at an unusual viewing distance from the visitor. “The video, by means of its simultaneously grotesque and delicate natures, formalizes the incidence of contradiction inherent between the sensual and the fragile aspects of relationships. From the first room, the plank carpet continues on to a throne situated in the back room, where the visitors, determining the rotation position of the chair themselves while sitting there, create the worlds and stories evoked by the exhibited drawings.”