Julia Scher at Kunsthalle Zurich
A wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser hangs discreetly subsequent to the curtained entrance major to “Julia Scher: Maximum Safety Society,” the artist’s very first institutional survey. A now-ubiquitous existence in any public arena, even if normally working on empty, such disinfectants are an simple-to-overlook hallmark of the company and political passions that govern our day-to-day lives, and to which we so (un)wittingly subscribe. Bearing the company branding of its maker, Protection by Julia (Dispenser), 2020, is amongst the twenty-odd latest and historic works—including multimedia installations, video clip, sculpture, as effectively as print and on line projects—that lay bare the networks, cash, and aesthetics of a surveillance lifestyle in which authority and seduction are not-so-distant kin.
A constellation of 3 artworks titled Mama Mattress, Papa Bed, and Newborn Mattress, all 2003, occupies the principal gallery of the exhibition, emphasizing the formal and conceptual strands at the centre of Scher’s practice. Just about every “embedded” bed, to use Scher’s time period, is equipped with diverse configurations of cameras, screens, microphones, and cabling, as effectively as a exclusive established of components to aid identification. Children’s fairy tale publications (together with Goldilocks and the A few Bears) and a leather whip are shown on Mama Mattress’s mattress, though Papa Bed is without doubt the one particular littered with crumpled military fatigues—underlining the overtly gendered mother nature inherent to observation. If this set up connects the dots involving armed service technologies and the modern day nuclear household, then the online video Willpower Masters, 1988, lets Scher to even more blur the division among the personal and community spheres. By considerably the most hypnotic piece in the exhibit, this four-hour-extensive confessional recounts, advertisement nauseam, the minutiae of the traumatic reminiscences that make up the artist’s childhood and adolescence. Extended in advance of the internet heralded the arrival of WikiLeaks or Really like Island, Scher was presently privy to the unscrupulous ideologies guiding stability society, slowly but surely unravelling the prevailing cult of eyesight by means of her very own clandestine procedure.
— Anya Harrison
