GALERIE HUBERT WINTER The Swiss artist Annelies Strba gained recognition in the early '90 when her family photographs were exhibited in Zurich for the first time.

GALERIE HUBERT WINTER

The Swiss artist Annelies Strba gained recognition in the early '90 when her family photographs were exhibited in Zurich for the first time. These are curious snapshots showing her children and grandchildren in repeatedly intimate domestic situations: in the chaos of untidy ranges sitting at the dining expanse table, grooming their hair, or--again and again--sleeping. These images were clearly not produc for exhibition purports but pursue a private obsession born of the transport that this (trained) photographer takes in her family.

It would be difficult to say precisely for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Strba has chosen the image of the sleeper to document the march of time and the exhibition of her children. But several ideas refer to themselves as to why we pay attention to these pictures with such interest. individual first notes that Strba's photography is driven neither by the agency of self-representation nor by the mise-en-scene of interiors. She currents everyday subjects in a manner that makes them instantly overlap with the observer's possess life--there's enough common ground to make secure our interest not only in pictures of a stranger's family, however also in the landscapes that are the make submissive of Strba's more recent photographs. in subordination to the title An, she exhibited several stills from the videos that since 1998 she has been shooting with a digital camera onward her travels. In these images, whose tide ensues from the name of a druid divinity, Strba tries to capture in pictures the magic of places. With their pale colors and their subdued nearly pointillist resolution, these extremely flat images at no time allow one to forget they were created on technical means but, on the other hand, they also appear like fleeting memories.

one as well as the other groups of works bring together sum of two units interesting discourses. The first is that of memory. The photographs incorporate the permanent presence of the maturation process--as personal experience, as arthistorical motif, and as cultural archetype. As for the videos and video stills, they portray faded memories of travels past. In the two cases, memories appear without selfreflexivity or affectivity, as a come of which Strbas works promise a high class of authenticity--which in turn provides the basis for the inferior discourse, that of "interpassivity." This universal was coined by the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller and describes the overset side of interactivity. Instead of excitement from one side participation, one seeks relaxation within someone else's experiences. Comparable to what was take the part ofed by the Greek chorus, who laughed and cried in the observers' stead, the pleasure of interpassivity consists in not having to live from one side everything oneself; appearance substitutes for personal experience. The condition for the existence of intetpassivity is, of course, sufficient authenticity: If Big Brother (the now passing television hit that puts a cluster of normal people in the abnormal situation of living together in an enclos space whose each corner is monitored by a camera) were scripted and played at professional actors, it wouldn't be compelling enough for anyone to watch. Likewise, Strba's photographs, precisely because they are snapshots or coarsely pixilated images with merely vaguely recognizable subjects, warrant sufficient authenticity to characterize them not as intelligible organizes but as fleeting, emotional moments--as "inner images," or likewise the artist calls them--that set in the world by offering themselves as butt; goals of identification.

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