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Tag: Switzerland

SWITZERLAND

basel-installation

Antikenmuseum Basel

Basel, Switzerland
April 28 – June 23, 1996

Prof. Dr. Peter Blome, Director
Prof. Dr. Margot Schmidt, Assistant Director
Dr. Barbara Begelsbacher, President Museum Commission
Anne-Kathi Wildberger, Head of Museum Education
Heide Hildebrand, WBB Austrian Curator and Coordinator
Ella Van der Meijden, WBB Swiss Curator and Coordinator
Dr. Sania Papa, WBB Greek Curator and Coordinator
Vera Giesel, Annerose Bekuhrs, WBB German Curators and Coordinators

 

Pandora, just to set things straight, was the Athenian name for the earth goddess Rhea. The nasty little tale told by Hesiod, the Greek historian, blaming all the world’s follies and ills on a woman who opened up a box of Spites, is “not a genuine myth but an anti-feminist fable, probably of his own invention,” according to mythographer Robert Graves. Pandora’s jar originally contained winged souls.

 

Well, than the real Pandora is back in action. Because of an idea hatched in Santa Barbara, 200 plus women artists from more than a dozen countries are sending their “winged souls” out into the world in tiny wooden boxes.

– Mary Heebner, Santa Barbara Magazine 1995

 

Lydia Dambassina – The Last Child, Greece, 1996

Lydia Dambassina – The Last Child – Greece
My work is a continuous relation with movement and time. The spiral is a symbol of life and fertility: the permanence of being under its mobility.

 

Ellen Wessinhage, Lorraine Serena, Sania Pappa, WBB Greece Curator, Vana Xenou (WBB Artist) at Opening of WBB Basel.
Ellen Wessinhage, Lorraine Serena, Sania Pappa,WBB Greece Curator, Vana Xenou, WBB Artist at Opening of WBB Basel

 

THE NEED FOR SOLIDARITY

Women Beyond Borders Catalog

Annemarie Monteil, Art Historian

 

Anne-Kathi Wildberger, Educational Curator and Heide Bilderbrand, WBB Austrian participant had the inspiration of including a segment of WBB along with Pandora, Women in Classical Greece, an exhibition of vessels and objects from 5th Century Greece, organized by Dr. Ellen Reeder of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Margot Schmidt, assistant director of the Antiken Museum, also wrote of this possibility, “I am looking forward to the realization of this project. If we can join WBB with Pandora in Basel, it would mean that we would link not only women of our time, but we would also link with the ancient Greek women who, at their time, had a strong need for solidarity. Pandora is the first ancient art exhibition in the world to center around women, and provides a groundbreaking perspective into their lives, customs, rituals and myths in an unprecedented gathering works of art from Greece.”

 

Dr. Sania Papa (Greece), Lorraine Serena, Dr. Margot Schmidt (Switzerland). Ella Van der Meijden (Switzerland), Frank Serena, Vana Xenou (Greece) at opening of WBB Basel.
Dr. Sania Papa (Greece), Lorraine Serena, Dr. Margot Schmidt (Switzerland). Ella Van der Meijden (Switzerland), Frank Serena, Vana Xenou (Greece) at opening of WBB Basel

 

As these ensembles stream in toward us from so many different places on earth, it is as if they brought to us the essence and spiritual climate of the land and its inhabitants. The voice of the Swiss artists is cooler, more intimate. In Greece one feels in the familiar company of myth. And the Americans radiate self-assurance. Cradle and coffin, boat and garden, altar and shrine expressed by what are at first only anonymous little boxes.

 

Anne Sauser Hall, Untitled (Pandora), 1996, Switzerland
Anne Sauser Hall, Untitled (Pandora), 1996, Switzerland

 

These happenings out of the lives of women, transformed through pictorial images, have nothing to do with feminine art but rather with the life wisdom of women – birth, death, transformation. With that wisdom, even within the smallest thing can lie the embryo of the great. Whoever finds her own vision as truly as possible has the power to grasp the world in the hollow of her hand.

 

Read Essay By Sania Papa about Greek Artists participating in this exhibition:

Truthful and Authentic Communication By Sania Papa

 

BOXES FROM SWITZERLAND

 

Untitled

The scrolls contain the following of my poems in free letter distribution:

Enfold                                          
the planet earth
world-encompassing
make it resound
with the small
and stammering voice
with the stammering
and gathering call
with the word
that was in the beginning
and worked with the breath
of regeneration
within you and me
enfold the planet earth
And do not forget the animals
our wordless siblings
do not betray them
for they crave justice
just as we do
return their dignity
return their rights of life
to them only thus may
the secret of human being
be rediscovered
as a light in the darkness
in the name of all
that lives and breathes
do not forget the animals
our wordless siblings
do not betray and market them
take not their dignity
away from them

The Key and the Walnut

Today the box arrived in the morning.  What will I put in?  Hopefully everything, or even better: The best.  Before I start working I’ll make an extra walk through the garden, maybe I’ll be able to think of a more concise way of what I want to do because ‘the best’ is a kind of program, a wish, not an image.  In any case, I’ll take the box with me, just like the little key for the upper garden.  This garden begins behind the very romantic door that we once discovered hidden under a thick layer of ivy.  Then we also discovered cannonballs made out of stone, old fashioned roses, wild orchids and rare lilies.  All of which we probably owe to the nuns who had owned this garden.  There also is an old, old walnut tree.  I  think of the history of the garden first owned by knights and later by the nuns.  Since when do gardens exist in general?  Looking at this carefully it seems that the history of gardens is very old as the history of mankind.  Opening the door, I am thinking of PARADISE, but my small, ordinary key brings me back into reality.  It cannot be compared to the masterpieces that we usually see on old pictures in the hands of St. Peter.  I feel a little sorry looking down at my machine-made product.  But, on the other hand, it is important to know what a key can do, not what it looks like.

Place Hotel

Awareness goes back and forth between the reception of the piece of fake chocolate and the reception of the model of a seemingly dislocated house.

Question:  Would you possibly, lost in thought, make little balls out of the wrapping paper of the chocolate that you have just eaten and/or ever tried to penetrate the deeper meaning of the many ways of reoccurring walls?

A Strange Tricky Game

The little showcase represents nothing unusual in connection to museum life if it were not for the object on display missing. One becomes aware of many suggestions and clues on the object concerned.

Simple tape markings on the bottom of the case and the glass say: FRONT, BACK, ANOTHER, ONE. The signs are to be read from the inside, not from the outside, thus we can read the direction from the side from which we are just looking out the showcase. The rest of the directions remains to be read backwards. To imagine to be in the case does not stop irritation, because the pane says FRONT is not opposite of the one which says BACK. It is impossible to relate ONE-ANOTHER- BACK AND FRONT to a single central point. Wherever one is standing, in reality or in imagination, we are bound to arrange these terms in a systematic order related to the surrounding space.

This space has to be considered not only around the vanished object, that is, the inside of the showcase, but also the space all around the showcase.

A Strange Tricky Game: contradictory and meaningful.

Untitled (Pandora)

People say that in some northern farmyards a cover closes the wells that are not in use anymore. The owners justify this closure, saying that children or visitors could, accidentally, fall to the bottom of one of these wells. The truth is that their motives are less thoughtful. What they fear is not that somebody might fall, but that the child who was thrown to the bottom of the well, like a family secret, suddenly surfaces again to the world.