HAMBURG.- In her second solo exhibition at the
Drawing Room, Paris-born, Berlin-based artist Maya Schweizer presents her latest video Errant Gestures in a film installation. In her eight-minute video, Schweizer shows a selection of intentional and unintentional movements in sound and image that oscillate between standstill and permanent movement. Her gaze focusses on the beginning or end of a movement, expressed by our extremities, hands and feet.
Mimic and gestural movement patterns have deep cultural roots that go back to the beginnings of human communication. Long before language developed, they already served as instruments of communication. Against this background, the simultaneous translation of expressive movements is already ingrained in us. We are constantly exchanging non-verbal messages - whether we want to or not. Sometimes the signals are clear, sometimes we misunderstand them. The body is never silent. When people come together, they talk to each other - even when they are not speaking. Facial expressions, gestures, posture and movement, spatial relationships, touch and clothing are important means of non-verbal communication - an age-old form of interpersonal understanding.
The thinking step, the waiting step, the hurrying step, the playing hand, the paying hand, the working hand, the stealing hand...
In one of the interwoven fragments of Schweizer’s film collage, we hear the media philosopher Vilém Flusser talking about characteristic patterns of movement and associating each of them with a particular kind of consciousness. These fleeting movements translate not only the moment between the before and the after, but also the brief trajectories between conscious action and the unconscious gestures that connect us to our environment in a barely perceptible way. With its flowing composition of wandering and searching gestures, the video creates spaces and images for not yet or no longer perceptible paths into the unconscious and subconscious depths of individual people and at the same time becomes a symbol of collective behavioural patterns of a society in transition.
Maya Schweizer (born in Paris) lives and works in Berlin. She studied art and art history at the University of Aix-en-Provence (1995 – 1998). Subsequently, she studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and then transferred to the Universität der Künste Berlin, where she completed her studies in the master class of Lothar Baumgarten in 2007.
Maya Schweizer has had solo exhibitions in the Westfälischer Kunstverein (2010), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2011), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016), Kunstverein Leipzig (2018), Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund (2020), Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2020), Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin (2023) and Jewish Museum in Berlin (2023).
She has won several awards with her work, including a Villa Aurora Fellowship in Los Angeles (2008), the e-flux Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2019), the HAP-Grieshaber-Prize VG Bild-Kunst (2022) and the DAGESH-Artprize (2023).
