Catherine Gfeller | 2023 Residency
Mainland China | Visual Arts
2023 — Visual Arts
Nationality: Switzerland
Residency location: Digital
Catherine Gfeller is a visual artist who currently lives and works in France and Switzerland.
During her 30-year career in photographic art, she has created a unique universe. Urban scenes, landscapes, women’s presences develop in multi-layered compositions to offer a subjective vision of our contemporary lives. Either in her immediate environment or in remote countries, she seeks to capture human’s vital connection to the outside world. In her museum exhibitions, Catherine Gfeller invites visitors to wander through large-scale installations made with photographs, video projections, sound pieces, or sculptural objects. The spectators are immersed in a sensorial universe, oscillating between enigma, fiction and reality.
In 1991, Catherine Gfeller obtained a Master’s degree in French Literature and Art History at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne. She lived in New York from 1995 to 1999. She then moved to Paris, receiving the HSBC Foundation Prize for Photography. Between 2010 and 2020, Gfeller is invited to create subjective city portraits. In response to the pandemic, the artist turns to the Anthropocene. She has been widely exhibited in Centre de la Photographie, Geneva; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; Centre Culturel suisse, Paris; Kunstmuseum KKL, Lucerne; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, etc.
Throughout the years, Gfeller has been working on the theme of women in different cities in China: Guangzhou, Kunming, Beijing and Hong Kong. After a first venue at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou in 2018, “China Driftings” will be presented in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chengdu and Beijing until 2025. Using multi-media means of expression, she questions the role of women at a time of deep change and crisis.
For this residency, Gfeller will continue this exploration of megacities in China. Her aim is to put up a multi-media exhibition combining large-scale photographs, multi-channel videos, sound installations, sculptural objects and texts calligraphed on the walls. She wishes to immerse the visitors in the middle of subjective narratives, combining personal perceptions of Chinese women protagonists and her own visions as a foreign artist.
(Portrait image courtesy Guillaume Perret, Musée Mahn, 2016)
