KARIEL Fokus: Kariel

In the annual exhibition Kunstschaffen Glarus und Linthgebiet the Glarner Kunstverein awards an exhibition prize, called Fokus award. The winner has the opportunity to present his or her work in a solo exhibition parallel to the presentation of the annual regional exhibition in the coming year.

In 2013 the professional jury has awarded the collaborative project from Karri and Muriel Kuoppala or KARIEL. The jury found their combination of graphic, realist and sculptural elements intriguing. Their work demonstrates professionalism and engages in an effective dialogue with the spaces in which it is exhibited. The piece in the exhibition, Mondturm, is based on a tower or column shape that relates formally to sculptural precedents, while also being totem-like. Approached from the staircase below, the white zigzag base focuses attention upwards towards the TV-monitor. This outdated monitor shows a silent loop in which images of the moon are animated, emerging from a central fold like Rorschach blots, scudding past or overlapping. The staging of the video – the illusion of reverence - is disrupted when the viewer approaches and moves around the piece to discover the tower's construction from roughly painted laminated wood in modular sections that are stacked on top of each other, materials and methods associated not with ritual but with reduced, Modern design. Likewise the video may encourage serious stargazing or be a light-hearted joke about the universe’s fruitfulness, digitally multiplied.

The judges are interested in how KARIEL work with the reduction of natural phenomena to symbolic form – a vocabulary that has been developed over centuries in fields such as astronomy and folklore - and the employment of this symbolic language in a contemporary art context.