Mia Sanchez at Kunsthaus Langenthal

Artist: Mia Sanchez

Exhibition title: Settings

Curated by: Raffael Dörig

Venue: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, Switzerland

Date: February 2 – April 16, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthaus Langenthal

For the solo exhibition Settings Mia Sanchez developed a new series of silkscreen prints, sculptures – models of everyday objects – and a video work. In these new works Mia Sanchez engages with the socio-political dimension of public space, social structures, and spaces of memory. The stage-like presentation of the models, the different ways the photographic collages can be combined by the viewer, and the absence of human bodies create a space where potential stories and ways of interacting become possible.

Strategies

Mia Sanchez assembled collected pieces of clothing in a photographic sample collection. The photographic templates of each garment are translated as silkscreen prints on raw canvas, combined during the analog printing process. The rough grid and reduction to black ink give them a uniform appearance. The clothes, accessories and shoes function as an interface between inside and outside, image and exhibition space. The series encourages us to think about the substance of clothing as carriers of identity and a means of social emplacement.

Schauplätze

In the sculptural series Schauplätze Mia Sanchez reflects on the function and design of our surroundings and the way we spend time, communicate, or play in them through the model-like recreation of standardized objects in public spaces. They are both everyday and iconic objects in urban and agglomeration spaces, which for Mia Sanchez are associated with memories as much as with a particular zeitgeist and the design language of built environments: Commercial satellite dishes, the bench „La Strada“ by Miramondo (1999) which is the standard bench of the cities of Basel and Vienna, the play sculpture „Lozziwurm“ by Yvan „Lozzi“ Pestalozzi (1972), the motorway service station in Pratteln known as „Windrose“ by the architects Casoni & Casoni (1978), or a sign board for traffic-calmed zones. The miniatures are reproduced both true to detail or more abstract, with which Mia Sanchez refers to the memory of omitting or adding things. Through the different scales of the execution, the relationship between the object and the body of the viewer can be constantly explored anew. The presentation on MDF boards, reminding of a makeshift stage, lets the objects become imaginary representations of reality.

Dipolar Flow

In her video Dipolar Flow, Mia Sanchez combines footage from a hall of mirrors at a funfair with a poetic text and a soundtrack of electronic music (composed by Yanik Soland), voice, and incidental noises. While walking through the nested labyrinth in the rotating light of a mirror ball, the physical space becomes a mental space: the inserted text reflects how language, time, clothing or urban planning shape and order the spaces in which we move. At the same time, it points out that their concepts are not to be understood as something rigid. Social structures are movable and malleable, and can always be constituted and reassesed through our walking, talking, or storytelling. In addition, she refers to the tradition of the mnemonic technique of memorizing things by assigning them to imagined places.

Mia Sanchez (*1988 in Sevilla) lives and works in Basel. Her objects, photographs, installations and video works are engaged with individual mementos, everyday objects, observations in public space and notions of social structures and orders. She uses shifts in scale, elements from puppetry or stage-like settings to refer to the difference between image and reality, rehearsal situation and realization. She studied art at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern, at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Hamburg and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel. Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions, and in 2019 she realized her first institutional solo exhibition at the Stadtgalerie Bern. In 2022 she was honored with a Swiss Art Award. Together with Andreas Kalbermatter and Dominic Michel, she directed the art space Riverside in Worblaufen.

Mia Sanchez would like to thank Gina Folly, Sven Gex, Silas Heizmann, Andreas Kalbermatter, Lucie Kolb, Anouk Madörin, Dominic Michel, Ivan Mitrovic, Sven Mumenthaler (Mumenthaler Works), Margherita Raso, Verena Romer Iversen, Nicolas Sarmiento, Yanik Soland, Geraldine Tedder, Meret Wagner and Gabriella Zehnder.

Mia Sanchez, Settings, 2023, exhibition views, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Photos: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artist