Uncanny – Vanessa Beecroft, Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, Natacha Lesueur, Wendy McMurdo

Good is no longer rosy and evil no longer black. Coziness is disappearing and the uncanny is creaping out of the “deep dark forest”: Borders have shifted, running through the middle of every day life, are in front of us, below us, in a deranging of the real; and borders have blurred: Good and Evil, fact and fiction have the same characteristics, bear the same stamp.

Vanessa Beecroft (I) with photographs of her famous synthetic performances, full of beauty and void of meaning, Anna Gaskell (USA) with her cryptic, fantastic children’s games, Natacha Lesueur (F) with her body works, between fashion and intrusion, desire and torture, Wendy McMurdo’s (GB) cloned lookalikes and her strange portraits of surfing without computers, playing without instruments, or Dana Hoey’s (USA) allusions to hidden things which soak through the seemingly harmless visible – the five artists have all created an atmosphere with their staged photographs which within the so very normal, so well-known, are infiltrated with shifts, breaks, with the cryptic, the unfamiliar and indeed with Sigmund Freud’s idea of the “uncanny”.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.