Part of ProtoZone17: Stories of those left behind, 15.11.2024-12.01.2025

Home to Earth

“Home to Earth” traces different understandings of origin and poses questions about kinship beyond bloodlines. The artist places the two drawings ‘Tired Activist Gets Energy Upload by Good Ghost’ (2020) and ‘Performing Earth’ (2022) in a context with the video work ‘Home’ (1998).

In it, the artist explores details of their then still-living mother’s apartment by means of a gently lingering camera gaze. The continuous slow-motion capture of surfaces, textures and fragments of her figure as part of this environment portrays her everyday life with a tender and anticipatory gaze, as if the past were being viewed from the future and as a temproality that is already confronted with an inevitable absence. The recordings seem to have fallen out of the world and mark the two decades that have passed since they were made.

The current drawings, on the other hand, testify to a continuity that has also endured for decades: Drawing proves to be a poetic-political practice in dealing with discrimination, grief, loss and powerlessness. The large-format drawings with meticulous details show subtle or explicit references and a certain mischievousness. They indicate how a certain form of resistance can become an everyday practice, entwined as life and work.

List of works:

1) Tired Activist Gets Energy Upload by Good Ghost, 2020

2) Performing Earth, 2022

3) Home, 1998

Sabian Baumann was born in 1962 and lives in Zurich. Sabian Baumann’s work, which revolves around the body, identity and cultural values, encompasses sculpture, installation and video, with a focus on figurative drawing. With stylistic references from art history and popular culture, Baumann stages irritating breaks and paradoxes that question common social norms and show normality as a negotiable exception in space and time. The playful appearance of Baumann’s works often unfolds a tragicomic humor. Another important part of Baumann’s work consists of various collaborative, transdisciplinary art activist projects with a queer-feminist and today intersectional approach, which they have initiated or co-organized, most recently “die grosse um_ordnung – Privilegien für alle” (2018) and the documentary “Wem gehört der Himmel” (80 min., 2022)