Vanessa Safavi Resorts

Originality meets postmodern zeitgeist, exoticism meets every day, sober minimalism meets colourful pop culture: Vanessa Safavi (b. 1980 in Lausanne, living and working in Basel and Berlin) plays in her works with contrasting polarities of cultural concepts and times, signs and materials. In her first institutional solo exhibition, in the Kunsthaus Glarus, she is showing new objects, a sculptural group and a large-scale, room-filling installation.

In her works the artist combines multi-layered cultural and art historical references in the form of objects, materials, pictures and references, transporting them from the resources of her own multicultural background, her travels and her ethnological research. Her work makes reference both to Primitivism in twentieth century art and consumerist as well as pop culture. They provide a partly critical, partly ironic involvement with the principles of both elaborated and naive creation. In the dialogue between pre-modern materials and modern garbage from the affluent society, fetishes of pop culture and pseudo-primitive totems, installations emerge that challenge treasured stereotypes of foreign cultures, experienced as exotic. Under the surface they also deal with (post-)colonial questions of cultural hegemony, the guilt and innocence of tourism and other subtle mechanisms of power and repression. The artist is fully aware of the potential problems of a western view of ethnologically coloured themes: she integrates them along with their contradictions. With her confrontations of elements of tribal traditions with the western postmodern, Safavi’s interest is continually focused on questions of transitoriness relating to all cultural values and properties. Sometimes her installations can also be understood as post-industrial scenarios, remnants of a once modern culture after its relapse into pre-modern life. In passing, the artist also touches on a range of ecological matters as well as being open to the magical and mythical. Fictitious and utopian thoughts of this kind, however, occur to Vanessa Safavi in no culturally pessimistic context; they reveal rather a refreshing relativism, in a playful, light-footed way. This relativism does not point to conflict-laden isolation but to the generally interconnecting humanity of all cultures. Safavi offers the viewer a generous space for his or her own thoughts; she deliberately constructs her pictures and scenarios in an open way, refusing rigid interpretations.