Nicolle Bussien at Stadtgalerie Bern

Artist: Nicolle Bussien

Exhibition title: Keys

Venue: Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Date: November 10 – December 9, 2023

Photography: Studio Mussano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Stadtgalerie, Bern

A key blank opens no doors. Only when cut does it work with a specific lock and thus a specific property. Is any other object so imbued with symbolism and metaphor as the key? An uncut key could be a utopia or simply a promise for the future middle class. Artist Nicolle Bussien is interested in keys as technology; as a set of various ideologies, policies, and processes of bureaucratic and legal authentica-tion.

Keys is the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Nicolle Bussien. The video works in the exhibition were developed from research, inter-views, or workshops with various communities. Using documentation, documentary fiction, and speculative narrative, she calls into question the dominant society and its representations. In Nicolle Bussien’s video productions, settings are created that give rise to the artistic work through dialogue and exchange between a plurality of actors, identi-ties, and experiences.

Nicolle Bussien’s artistic research is not passive observation, but rather a form of community-based work. The protagonists of her videos are invariably co-producers of knowledge. Identity plays a key role in the artist’s work, but it serves as the lens through which she explores the workings of power, not the goal.

The exhibition centers on the video installation Aboutaroundabout (2023), created in collaboration with artist Giorgia Piffaretti. The social, local, and cultural-political dynamics of a community play out around a sculpture located in a roundabout in the Ticino border town of Mendrisio. In work-shops and interviews, the residents debate the sculpture’s racist and patriarchal connotations and its impacts on everyday coexistence.

In the video essay Act privileged! (2021), the camera focuses on the hands of the actors as they reproduce a nightclub entry stamp using a felt-tip pen and adhesive tape. In a voice-over, barriers to cultural participation in (night) life are discussed and analogies drawn to exclusionary practices in society as a whole. The dialogues were created during working groups, discussion rounds among participants, and in scenic reenactments of their own experiences.

The video Als ob (As if, 2023) is part of a series of works in which Nicolle Bussien addresses the topic of theft. Hands in contour can be seen making various gestures. Directives appear as subtitles: “Act as if…” The precondition of a successful theft is that the act must go unseen. The imperative of the directives generates tension between the possibility and impossibility of conforming to the dominant society as its precondition of non-visibility.

In Copy (2023), the artist documents key makers copying keys. The video relates to the work Schlüssel ABC (2023), a series of five posters of unique, uncut key blanks displayed in public space for the duration of the exhibition. One version can be seen on the placard wall next to the Stadtgalerie entrance.

In the first part of the exhibition, the text work Vermögensumverteilungsgesetz (Wealth Redistribution Act, 2022) is available as a hand-out. The fictitious legal text is based on an unconfirmed legal tradition that ostensibly legalized the theft of foreign property in ancient Egypt. Together with a lawyer and in consultation with two legal experts, the artist adapted this ancient legal tradition into a form consistent with today’s Swiss penal code.

Hands carry out work and communicate, commit theft, or sign contracts and forms. In the exhibition Keys, the artist is interested in the gestures of institutional authentication that promote access or exclusion, as well as gestures of their subversion and self-empowerment.

Nicolle Bussien, Keys, Stadtgalerie Bern, 2023, installation view. Photo: Studio Mussano