JENNIFER NIEDERHAUSER SCHLUP
Come un’aria di fine del mondo
If many “ideal cities” remained only at the stage of dreams in the mind of their creators, some were completed. The “ideal city” is conceptually elaborated before being materially built, and its foundation results from an intellectualized and unified will. These visions of the social and urban organization of the ideal city are indeed closely linked to notions of Utopia.
Utopia is first of all a work of literary fiction with no link to reality, representing an ideal society, opposed to imperfect real societies.
In this regard one could consider Gibellina Nuova, the «concrete utopia», the catalog city. The recovery of memory and the creation of a new identity through art.
Drawing on notions of Utopia and the Ideal City, this project intends to question the spaces we inhabit and people’s interactions with a specific urban environment.
During a residency, having photographed individual elements of architecture and sculptures throughout the town, the Swiss artist recreates an entirely new panoramic image, which will confront the ideals of the man behind the urban planning of the town and the small cracks that take place when faced with actual daily life. A large scale and immersive display, a kind of mise en abyme of the town itself. A poetic ode to a town that feels a little bite like being on the edge of the world.
BIO
Jennifer Niederhauser Schlup (Lausanne, CH, 1981) is a photographer, art director, teacher, and the co-founder and editor of Adventice Editions. Trained both in analog and digital processes, her work strives for the fine equilibrium between the material and the virtual; between the physical link and traces constitutive of traditional notions of photography and the mosaic possibilities of computer-generated imagery.
Her images are subtle simulacra, which purpose is to generate new perceptions, where true and false take on another dimension.
She uses the photographic space as an unstable stream of information that can be pulled in any number of directions, with the aim to confound visual experience — blending the connection between the «real» subject and the overlaid digital interventions. The distinction between virtual and lived (or embodied) experience collapses increasingly not simply as a perceived illusionism, but rather as a sort of profound confusion constantly vacillating between virtual and real. Bringing together heterogeneous techniques and modes of representation, mixing «straight photographs» with highly manipulated images thus blurring the fine line between fact and fiction her practice is an experiment on bringing forward the unfathomable and deceiving qualities of the medium, while retaining a narrative quality open to personal interpretation and a search for a certain truth.
Jennifer Niederhauser Schlup gained a Master in Art Direction, Photography from the University of Art and Design Lausanne ECAL (2012). She also holds a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design — MassArt (2004). Her work has been shown in various exhibitions, festivals and publications, nationally and internationally : Le Boutographies, FOAM Talent, Photoforum Pasquart, Musée de l’Elysée, Festival Voies Off Arles, British Journal of Photography, Musée Ariana, Kunst(zeug)haus Rapperswil, Aperture Foundation, etc.