Cable Depot, Sofia
Gabriela Loffël
For Art-O-Rama 2025 Cable Depot Sofia presents two works by Swiss artist Gabriela Löffel (b.1972, CH), including a new series of photographs commissioned for the fair. The two works together propose a space for scrutinising the current politics of Europe.
‘Embedded Language’ (Installation / 2 Channel video / Headsets / 19min. / 2013). At an International Defence Exhibition in Poland, the artist interviewed, in English, an executive from a Polish arms manufacturing firm. She then transposed this filmed interview in a Dubbing-studio in Montreal, Canada. There, dubbing artist and actor Jean-Luc Montminy(who is the French-Canadian voice for actors including Bruce Willis and Denzel Washingtonamong others) dubbed the interview into French in collaboration with a studio director and a sound engineer, using the similar infrastructure as for a major film production. ‘Embedded Language’ captures this moment of language and discourse deconstruction and reconstruction with Löffel’s camera. The moment at which an arms engineer is given another language and other words by a dubbing artist translated in a fictional space, as cinema, becomes visible and audible here. The installation comprises two synchronized screens and the sound on headphones. The audio is in French.
The artist is realising a new series of 8 photographs for Art-O-Rama 2025. This series of photographs is an expanding fragment of Löffel’s ‘Unseen’ (lightboxes, 2016) in which the artist observes the presentation and representation of the financial industry during a trade event.
