Harald Pridgar,
Jacqueline Jurt
«MIA»

A rocket shoots up in the sky behind the Kunsthalle. Threatening near by the barracks of the police the missile, filled with silver iodide, forces its way through the silver-gray, wide shell above our heads. Against hail, lasting higher and higher away from the David Street soars the little flying object. The artists Jacqueline Jurt and Harald Pridgar from the eastern part of Switzerland (they live in Frankfurt a. Main) built the missile to ward off the destructive power of the cloud from the core. Silver rain instead off ice-clear missiles. Artistically ammunition. Protection of everyone captured on video. For days both waited for a thunderstorm. Scanned the sky for thunderclouds. Worldwide, there are every day allegedly 45`000 lightening in the canopy. But it’s not possible to anticipate the moment when the thunderstorm will hit in St.Gallen and break above the Kunsthalle, although the eastern part of Switzerland is a region of thunderstorms and high hail risk. Pridgar and Jurt are fascinated by the heaven above St.Gallen. During the millennium they let air-pressure rockets rise weekly out of their base station in a monastery cellar; with best wishes for the New Year.

The human dimension of weather is also present in the current meteorology. As everybody knows, each high- or low-pressure area bears a first name. Recently the longed high-pressure areas were of male nature, the agile low-pressure areas whereas were female.

MIA isn't at all a low-pressure area but the sportswoman of the year. The American Mia Hamm is known on the soccer pitch for her playful high pressure. When she is around the antagonistic penalty area, her rivals are afraid of her. In America women soccer is controversially more popular than the men's soccer league. Mia Hamm, the world star with prestigious sponsoring contracts, is in America coequal to her European peers.

Pridgar and Jurt created in the name of MIA for the Kunsthalle St.Gallen a new collection. The individual garments (all football-skirts) are made of existing football-shirts and give plenty of leeway to the legs. The MIA-collection is an epilogue to the men-bound world championship. The stylish skirts are tailored out of sweat absorbing canvas in the colors of the big Calcio: Juventus Turin, Olympique Marseille, Manchester United, CF Barcelona, Glasgow Rangers and how they all are called.
In the Kunsthalle, they are exposed in a special showroom. On the wall flaunts like a logo the name of the heroine MIA.

Pridgar and Jurt dismantle pictures. In their works, they join frazzles of perceptions, myths, and stereotypes or, as here showed, formfitting football-shirts to a piece of artistic reality. Thereby they often use strengthened pictures, which they break down and dispose step by step.
In the foreground are patterns of identity in the kind of sexuality, nationality or transcendentality. The Kunsthalle is pleased with the presence of her patron saints couple.
May this autumn implicate a lot of thunderclouds!

The artist Frédéric Post (*1967, he lives in Geneva) is an inventor. Miracol is the name of the PVA he uses to cast from vinyl his platters. A casting, an analog coping process, a piece of filtered music, of the brand "self-made". So far ignored by the music industry in contrast to the bugaboo "mp3". Played backwards and provided with varied side noises, well-known melodies tinge totally different slowed scurrile and almost melancholic.