WVK, Zug
Yann Stéphane Bisso, Isabella Fürnkäs
For Art-o-rama 2024 Windhager von Kaenel proposes a duo presentation of German and French artist Isabella Fürnkäs (*1988) alongside Geneva based Cameroonian artist Yann Stéphane Bisso (*1998) who enter an intimate conversation about questions of belonging and the space that opens up between the familiar and the unknown.
Visitors find themselves amidst playful objects displayed on used furniture populating the space as part of Fürnkäs’ ongoing series Remote Control (2023-ongoing). A number of playful ceramic models contrast the flawless surfaces of smartphones. These remotes are everywhere. As tools of everyday they penetrate our lives so intricately as to spin a web of seeming control. But might there be a hunch of ridicule within the childlike allure of the prop’s sparkling buttons? How much of our lives do we trustfully transfer to these small, lifeless devices? Through our relentless feeding they become containers of data and demarkations of our identity. But in the age of ideological inertia, identity seems to digest itself through technologies of the self. And we are left to ask: Who controls the remote control?
Bisso’s sensual paintings invite us into his very own dreamlike state between memory and fantasy: depictions of bursting clouds mix with dancing animals and ghostly symbols. Through the painterly construction of hybrid landscapes, the artist is thinking about his diasporic identity, to open up spheres beyond the familiar and renegotiate the process of semiotic transactions between cultures – a portrait equally personal, spiritual and political. Fürnkäs lets us come even closer in a series of diary-like doodles: The Red Drawings (2021) function as an autopoietic archive of gestures, bringing together cycles of a fragmented but healing body.
Ultimately, Windhager von Kaenel’s proposal invites us to think about different dimensions of cultural identity and their intertwining with subjectivity.
