Georg Aerni: Silent Transition – Fo­to­s­tiftung Schweiz, Switzerland

Georg Aerni
Silent Transition

11/06 – 16/10/2022
OPEN­ING: Fri 10/06/2022, 6 pm

Born in 1959 in Win­terthur, Georg Aerni has, in par­al­lel to his work as an ar­chi­tec­tural pho­tog­ra­pher, pro­duced an artis­tic oeu­vre: a sen­si­tive in­ven­tory of urban spaces and sur­pris­ing in­ter­faces be­tween cul­ture and na­ture. Along­side ex­ten­sive themed es­says, for in­stance on the ram­pantly spread­ing green­houses in South­ern Spain or the wildly sprawl­ing res­i­den­tial quar­ters in Cairo, he has cre­ated many im­ages that tell of change and decay, of com­ing into being and ceas­ing to be. Aerni is not in­ter­ested in per­fect fa­cades, but in new and old ruins, im­pro­vised dwellings, or in­stal­la­tions that have be­come use­less. He does not pay at­ten­tion to pic­turesque land­scapes, but to gnarled growths on a tree trunk, washed-up drift­wood, or bar­ren rock faces marked by ero­sion.
His vi­sual ex­plo­rations also prove to be an at­tempt to vi­su­alise the pass­ing of time. Un­ob­tru­sively, some­times with an ironic un­der­tone, he asks ques­tions about the han­dling of re­sources or the sus­tain­abil­ity of seem­ingly sta­ble con­struc­tions. His pre­cise doc­u­men­tary ap­proach co­a­lesces with the sur­real po­etry and beauty of the ran­dom. This pho­tog­ra­pher thus gen­er­ates a sense of won­der with­out glo­ri­fy­ing the cir­cum­stances.

The Fo­to­s­tiftung Schweiz ex­hi­bi­tion pre­sents a se­lec­tion of quite re­cent works, pro­duced since the com­pre­hen­sive pub­li­ca­tion Sites & Signs (2011).

A mono­graph ti­tled Silent Tran­si­tion, edited by Peter Pfrun­der and Na­dine Olonet­zky, is being re­leased by pub­lisher Schei­deg­ger & Spiess.