Marc Bauer: An unser Schicksal von Heute und Morgen

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstrasse, Zurich

“The trip to Afghanistan by Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart in 1939, alone in a car with Swiss number plates, remains one of the most inspiring journeys of the 20^th century. Both women have written about their experience, their struggle with each other, with life, with fate and with the world beyond the fathomable. In addition, Ella Maillart has filmed their journey, while Annemarie Schwarzenbach has taken countless photographs. It is the latter that have inspired Marc Bauer for a new and compelling series of drawings. Once again the Swiss artist, who is currently based in Berlin, has reworked well-known, iconic photographs transforming them into worlds of his own. So while we return to the Herat, to the Mazar-i-Sharif and above all to the Bamyan that the two Swiss travellers visited almost 80 years ago, we see these places through the eye and pencil of a contemporary artist. Sometimes he adds colour to his images drawing us into a world beyond the black and white of interwar photography. At other times he alters the scenery by effacing people present in the originals or by adding them on – most hauntingly a group of burka-clad women next to the large Buddha of Bamyan destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. That same year the collapse of the Twin Towers has not only entered our collective memories but also ushered in a new era of political uncertainty. The uncanny parallels between our times and the months and weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, when Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart drove to Kabul, render Marc Bauer’s new series both haunting and inspiring. For despite the sense of dread some of his images effuse, their coloured sisters are full of hope, the drug we now need more than ever. “

Marc Bauer‘s graphic work is rendered almost exclusively in black-and-white, a pared-down aesthetic that seems deliberately evocative of old photographs. Bauer often produces works in series, and his exhibitions are usually conceived as site-specific installations that address the exhibition space as a larger composition. Visually, Bauer’s works are typically dark in tone and the contours of his figures are often blurred, through his practice of using a hard thin eraser to rub away and smear the graphite and lithographic chalk and to achieve a sense of depth. A key recurring theme in Bauer’s art is history and memory – the personal and the collective – which he presents as closely intertwined.