Edition

C-print on aluminium
4 ed & 2 Ad 180cm x 90cm

Nomination Drebbel Award, Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam

The beauty smells already

Because the action became more important to her than the static image, Sonja Wyse developed over the years a strong affinity to the medium video. The stories, she tells, are showing a search journey after an acceptable identity, a desperate investigation of the own origin, of the basis of melancholy, anger and emotion. The journey turns out as strict training, whereby the bodily functions are subjected to laboratory experiments.

In pure intact condition an organism is the most beautiful – however nothing remains intact, vulnerability and transistoriness is part of each organism. This one can be kept upright with prostheses and be attained thus a longer life spans, but on which it arrives finally, is the original, pure condition: the values, which lie in everyone.

The videos of Sonja Wyss represent situations, which show themselves immediately. The uncanny in many of her works provides for the emotion, which causes her with the viewer. On a photograph she sits naked with the organs of a cow on her lap and her arms. It is the reversal of the subject “Der Tod und das Mädchen” “death and the girl” and at the same times a kind of “Pieta”. The internal is turned outward. The beauty puts its heart on the table: the organ meat of the aesthetics is thrown us into our lap. Who wants to turn its nose there? It smells already, the beauty, but Sonja Wyss arouses it from the mortuary passionately to the life and measures her crutches on, with which she learns to walk again.

Alex de Vries, art critic, Arnhem, NL