Raphaela Vogel

My Appropriation of Her Holy Hollowness

Video diptych, two screens, colour, 13'17'' and 05'04'', 2021

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With this video work, featured on two screens on either side of the rails, Raphaela Vogel is creating a strange dialogue with a powerful visual impact, combining textual snippets and image-objects of disparate purposes. The contrast between the two panels is striking: on one screen, two cells develop under a microscope, one of the nascent lives is declared the winner by a faceless figure, judge of an unresolved boxing fight. The image is flat and grey. On the other screen, the gaze wanders over outdated figures and objects. These are images captured by a giant 3D scanner, the size of an entire room. The two parts of the work are linked by a sparse literary narrative, the reading of which is consciously chopped up by the artist, mirroring an experimental situation.

By creating links between sculpture and video, between volumes and colours, Vogel confronts different scales within the same space. The visuals thus created by the three-dimensional collage are reminiscent of immersive gaming. Technology, objects and bodies echo each other in a rotating and self-reflexive movement, using a heterogeneous vocabulary stemming from science, cybernetics, neoclassicism and mythology. The truncated dialogue that hovers over the two videos is made abstract by the nature of the language as well as its unfolding rhythm. These words extracted from an unknown context seem to carry potential messages to unidentified recipients. The raw poetics of the text confronts that of the colourful images, while the fragmented flow of the visuals reveals an intimacy and fallibility supposedly acknowledged by the artist.

Production: Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Genève

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Raphaela Vogel

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Raphaela Vogel was born in 1988 and studied in Nuremberg and Frankfurt am Main. She participated in the De Ateliers programme in Amsterdam and then became a substitute lecturer at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Basel, Zurich, Shanghai, Berlin, Munich and Bregenz, and more recently in Milan and Paris, and is regularly included in group exhibitions in Europe and overseas.

Raphaela Vogel is a multidisciplinary artist, using video, installation, sculpture, music, performance and painting. Collage and assemblage also play an important role in her work, at the crossroads of science fiction, dreams, feminist theories, punk and mythology. Her strength lies in the 3D setting of dramatic narratives through complex installations. Projectors and technical equipment are treated as active protagonists: when she hangs or balances them, the artist diverts them from their primary function, revealing their structure and assigning them multiple meanings. Video is central to her work, where questions of spatiality, technology, the machine and the body are often echoed. She also uses video as a means of documenting her own installations, collages and archive images.