First Kadist – Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award
Kadist Art Foundation and Kunsthalle Zürich are pleased to announce the first Kadist – Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award winner, Swiss artist Kaspar Müller (*1983, lives and works in Zürich and Berlin). The award enables the production of Kaspar Müller’s video forever alone and around the world . The video is part of his ongoing project devoted to historical cities, in particular here the cities of Colmar and Strasbourg. Müller is working on a serie of visual studio recordings based on his previous exhibitions as a partly real, partly fictional summary of the project. As a first chapter Colmar & Strasbourg (Blue-Ray, 42 min) was presented in the Manor Kunstpreis solo exhibition at the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen in 2010. In the video a young man with a big hat visits the two cities in the French Alsace which are hard to distinguish in the film. In a passive-aggressive state of mind he strolls around the historic sites and follows the flow of visitors. He gets on a tourist boat which travels the canals with its staged middleage townships contrasted by the curved glass facades of the newly built European Parliament. In his last exhibition at Galerie Francesca Pia I was in Trinidad and learned a lot in 2011 he conceived a complex installation including a series of film stills from the video. Müller colored the stills in blue and presented them along sculpural works which literally quoted artefacts from aquariums or ruins from deep under the see. The remembrance of the earlier presented video seemed to be restaged in an uncanny travel to Atlantis. Kaspar Müller studied fine arts in Basel where he co-initiated Galen an artist-run space in collaboration with the siblings Flora and Emil Michael Klein. He recently had solo exhibitions at Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich and Gasconade in Milano and was part of group exhibitions such as The Log-O-Rithmic at GAMeC in Bergamo and Corso Multisala at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. Nominators 2012 Beatrix Ruf, Director, Kunsthalle Zürich Simon Maurer, Director, Helmhaus, Zürich Fredi Fischli / Niels Olsen, Studiolo, Zürich Jury Jury members are the nominators and three advisors of Kadist Art Foundation (Sandra Terdjman, Jeremy Lewison and Jens Hoffmann).