Claudia Kübler | Residency

April - June 2021 — Visual Arts

Zurich based artist, Claudia Kübler, will be on a residency from 10 April to 5 June 2021 at the Nirox Foundation, located in the Cradle of Humankind in Maropeng to the west of Johannesburg, researching and developing work around the topic of deep time.

Claudia explains: “The core of my artistic practice is the exploration of the phenomenon of time. I work with processes, regimes, potentials and conflicts of the fourth dimension, including our comprehension and incomprehension of time. Sometimes references to geology appear. I am currently engaged with the concept of deep time, which describes ultra-slow time processes that go beyond a human time horizon to the planetary and the geological, a supra-human time. I ask myself in which time dimensions we are capable of thinking at all, how linearity can be undermined or what a non-anthropocentric understanding of time could look like.”

In relation to this, Claudia is interested in interrogating the temporality of art, which traditionally, is conceived of to endure beyond the lifespan of the artist and to be collected, conserved, and archived for posterity. In a recent work, Regolith, Claudia developed a floor installation that was radically transformed through the duration by visitors to the exhibition. The work referred to the mineral cycle of erosion and sedimentation, and simulated a quasi-geomorphological process in fast forward.

The Cradle of Humankind is a significant and world-renowned paleoanthropological site where some of the oldest hominin fossils have been found, some dating back as far as 3.5 million years. During her residency, Claudia plans to engage with palaeontologists around big questions relating to time to develop a new project that takes this enigmatic and significant site as a starting point.

BIOGRAPHY

Claudia Kübler was born in 1983 in Zurich. She studied in Geneva, Edinburgh and Lucerne where she completed her Master of Arts in Fine Arts with distinction in 2012. Her art has been shown in exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Helmhaus Zürich, Kunsthalle Luzern as well as artgenève, where she was nominated for the Prix Mobilière. Between 2013 and 2020 Claudia was co-organizer of the artist-run space Alpineum Produzentengalerie in Lucerne. From 2016 – 2019 she worked at the Zurich University of the Arts, in the MA Fine Arts program, where she taught several seminars around the topic of time as well as one in collaboration with Uriel Orlow and Gerald Raunig.