Cable Depot, Sofia
Gabriella Loffël
For Art-o-rama 2025 Cable Depot Sofia presents a solo presentation of two works by Swiss artist Gabriela Löffel. On the left and right walls of the booth will hang seven framed photographs on aluminium, which together comprise a new series the artist has been commissioned to produce for Art-O-Rama. On the central wall will be a work from 2013 on two flatscreens, with two sets of headphones and a bench. The two works together frame aptly the current politics of Europe.
The central work in the booth is ‘Embedded Language. 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 FrenchCanadian voice for actors including Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington) dubbed the interview into French in collaboration with a studio director and a sound engineer, as would be done for a motion picture 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 and the technical infrastructure at a cinema becomes visible here. This process can possibly lead to questions about language and power and their (in)visibility, and also brings in the issue of armed politics in relation to film and the film industry. The installation comprises two synchronized screens and the sound on headphones. The audio is in French.
On the left and right walls are seven framed photographs, which together form a new series of works. Löffel used a similar format for her 2016 series of photographic light boxes ‘Unseen’, in which she observes the presentation and representation of the world of finance at close quarters and investigates the codes produced by them. The first edition of ‘Unseen’, was acquired by the MAST Photography Collection in Bologna.
