BIRSFELDEN.- At its core, the group exhibition Ultra Regio embodies a productive dissonance, confronting regional intimacy while transcending it.
The title combines two movements: Ultra, in the colloquial sense of extreme – the utmost regional, radically local, a deliberate grounding in the here and now – and, in its Latin origin, ultra evokes going beyond, the other, the unbounded. City SALTS, a former butcher’s, a garden by the river, and an art space nestled among residential buildings at the city’s edge on the cantonal border, has for sixteen years invited artists to actively engage with their immediate surroundings. Its permeable architecture – largely outdoors, without a covered foyer or corridors – ensures that inside and outside remain in constant, almost inevitable dialogue. Against this backdrop, Ultra Regio understands the region not as an administrative space but as an energetic field: a zone of transition, permeability, and encounter. In the logic of Regionale 26 – an initiative activating the tri-border area of Germany, France, and Switzerland – this tension is almost emblematic: the Regionale seeks to transcend borders without thinking in national terms; it aims to be trinational while leaving nationalism behind. From this gentle disorientation emerge artists who experience reality as porous and unstable. Their works move between body, memory, and landscape, weaving a web in which boundaries – formal and geographic, visible and invisible – are continuously shifted and rendered permeable.
Ultra Regio brings together eleven positions in painting, drawing, sculpture, and video, connected by their engagement with representation. The works orient themselves toward figuration rather than abstraction, although they approach the figure in diverse and often experimental ways. Many begin with the body: Arbesa Musa reduces figures to graphic schemata, where body hair remains as a warm element, quietly subverting the body’s shaped landscape. Ramiro Oller distorts subtly, inflating tongues, creating organic hybrids that shift between cuteness, discomfort, and fragility. Wenhao He evokes childlike wonder, opening dreamlike pictorial spaces where animals, myths, and childhood memories interlace. From this line, memory takes material form: Rose Le Goff anchors cast baby teeth in the floor, transforming architecture into a carrier of intimate traces of growing up. Ayumi Tomita’s modular miniatures – small stages of remembrance – and Noémie Vidonne’s fragile balances, carefully stacked wooden gift parcels, speak of the past as an unstable, continuously reconstructed structure. Lizz Keller transforms a bar of soap into a monument of cleanliness and erasure, symbolizing smoothing, masking, and neutralization. From the materialization of memory, the artists’ perception moves outward into landscapes, where psychological states, imagination, and memory blur geographic boundaries. Ye Qian’s surreal tables flow between nature and consumer culture, exposing the absurd contradictions of everyday life. Anaïs Strübin’s digitally fragmented beach tableau unsettles consumer fantasies and surface aesthetics. Tabea Wasserfall’s foaming waters dissolve contours. Linus Weber, finally, translates the world into a post-digital fauna where humor and horror, cuteness and dread, coexist closely.
Ultra Regio becomes a gentle experiment in tilting the coordinates of the real: body, memory, landscape – all in motion, all in flux. Borders are not fixed lines but constantly shifting. In the end, the ultra meets the regio, the regio meets the ultra – and it is precisely in this flowing tension that the exhibition’s power lies: in perceiving a world in transition.
