The Basel based artist Sonja Feldmeier (*1965) is concerned with issues like territorial power relations, politics and constructions of identities. Her work is a condensation of complex allusions and references. Role models get fissures and become brittle, yet thereby reveal precisely their social impact. The power of Sonja Feldmeier’s artistic work is thus particularly manifest in the renegotiation of the presented stereotypes, eventually culminating in the corrosion thereof.
In this year’s show „Lost Call“ at the exhibition venue „Klingental“ in Basel, the artist rendered different armies’ camouflage-patterns analogous to adapted geographical maps. Due to the artistic transformational process, topographies have come into existence that not only depict hypothetical landscapes, but the respective nations’ political and strategic inter-weavings.
For her exhibition INHALE EXHALE at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen Sonja Feldmeier builds a forest like scenery made of a prop construction. The public encounters a hardly fathomable environment in which the artists embedded three new works that are all circling around communication processes and different models of identities.
In one of these installative works various voices are to be heard emerging from a rootstock, interpreting a song by Frank Sinatra, the American entertainer par excellence. In this way, Sonja Feldmeier refers to role models and public icons within our society, which ultimately lead to a tension between individual designs for living and public social figures we get filtered through the media.
In the adjacent room there is a video projection. A woman wearing an enormous burqa is vehemently beating the drums. At the beginning of the solo piece, the film shot frames the area around her eyes, subsequently shows the entire person and finally pans back in the direction of the public. Analogies to music video clips appear appropriate. However, this supposition is undermined again by the last panning shot as the viewer assumes the position of the female drummer herself in the end. Also the logic concerning the content of music clips in which the stars celebrate their ego is driven ad absurdum. The textual surface “burqa” forecloses an approximation to the person underneath the clothing. Thus, the impression of a music clip changes, becomes ambiguous and leads one to think that an archetype of a woman is framed here, whose image however is based on our very own projections.