cadavre DU 3.Akt, 2021
Collaboration project with Chris Bünter at Last Tango, Zürich / Photography: Kilian Bannwart
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The collaboration between Tashi Brauen & Chris Bünter is a new one, albeit having known each other as friends for years. What came to be was a reactive sequential process, one following the method of exquisite cadaver. The works exchanged hands sometimes up to four times. Brauen created monotypes on paper and Bünter responded to these by making square and circular cut-out collages. The paper support for these layered compositions is one already lled with meaning. They used older issues of Du, a Swiss magazine existing since 1941 on culture and art history. These supports in this instance might evoke connections to bourgeois intellectual culture, leisure and travel. The intuitively created monotypes and collages fuse together with the printed pages of the magazine. A spontaneous gesture contrasting with the discursive edited content of the page.

The joint collaboration has resulted in recent exhibitions in Basel and Bern, with the third and last “act” (as the artists have described it) of cadavre, DU at Last Tango. For each of the acts they created a site-specific work by using the same material every time. The artists “recycled” old pages of a magazine, and in each exhibition space the artists sought out an open-ended approach, one that was responsive and site-specific to each space: In Put-to-bed the large-scale installation A Day in October (2021) entirely covers one wall. The nearby work Hans im Glück Eindruck Ross (2021) shows a reverse side of one of the monotyped collages, making visible tape and the signatures of the artists. Together they display a positive and negative space reversal. For each act there is a specially created artist book. After working together for some time, the artists thought some of the back sides were just as appealing as the front side. In order to make both sides visible they recreated the magazine format. The artist book is available to see at the front desk.

Linda Jensen & Arianna Gellini, November 2021