Corinne Schatz, 2003

In her video performance moments of a person, Nesa Gschwend operates on the interface between visual and performance art to combine two modes of expression that have had equally formative in- fluences on her work to date. Gschwend made her name in the early nineteen-eighties as the co-founder of the Berlin-based Pan- Optikum performance group, and from 1986 on as a solo performer in St. Gallen; the past years, howe- ver, have seen her doing mostly installations, works in paint involving objects. Now, in her new performance project, the artist attempts to reconcile these two levels of her creative process, to bring them into contact as a means of investigating their interdependence.

The project has its origins in the likenesses that have furnished Nesa Gschwend with her subject for some years now. Although derived from self-portraits, Nesa Gschwend's heads bear no recognisable resemblance to the artist's features; rather, they seem to have materialised out of the mist like appari- tions. Instead of rendering her own reflection, Gschwend is attempting to create a likeness of her inner self. She wants to observe herself from within, to penetrate with her eye beyond the exterior physiog- nomy, to get underneath her own skin, as it were. Working with wax and graphite, she melds paper, sketch and wax together, layer upon layer, until she has developed a semi-transparent materiality remi- niscent of parchment, or indeed of skin. These are not, then, self-portraits in the classical sense. The barest attempt has been made to achieve gestural or expressive verisimilitude: these are visions rather than faces.

One searches in vain for the influence of the centuries-old tradition of portraiture in these heads, for there is not a trace of the effort to externalise the personality of the sitter in the facial featu- res, nor to render palpable the life lived, or the feelings felt. And yet they are by no means without mood or expression: indeed, the heads alternate among a variety of attitudes, now introverted, now entranced, now alert, open and vibrant with life. Nesa Gschwend seems to have discovered an imagis- tic vocabulary with which she can visually express interior life and psychic vicissitudes virtually free of all that is material and corporeal: a veritable paradox. The performance occurs in a space filled with these airy, virtually diaphanous visions, five groups of twenty projected in a fluent segue onto the rear wall. Before them lies a square of oil-cloth, powdered with flour.

This is the installation in which the five stations of the performance take place. Nesa Gschwend has depicted the route that runs from the conscious to the unconscious, and which issues in a dream. The oil-cloth and the flour stand for the transition from the outer to the inner life of the person represented. Accordingly, Nesa Gschwend begins by circling the area, pacing out its peri- metre, placing shoes around the edge, eating; and it is only by the fourth picture that she enters the inner surface, white and untouched. But there too she confines her movements to the edges, following a particular path and taking possession of the space before settling into its midst, where she creates a sleeping place for herself by strewing flour across it, smoothing it out with her hands and hair, and recli- ning upon it. Finally she draws the oil-cloth around her body and is still - as if in a cocoon. This is the form that remains at the end as an empty container; it has become something else once the person has silently left the space.

The third level, along with the portraits and the performance, is that of sound. From the outset, the mur- muring, scratching, occasionally chopping sounds of the writing process direct the subject's stream of consciousness toward the outside. What we are witnessing is the recording of those inner images and fantasies that will later take shape in the performance. The script displayed in the course of the perfor- mance is done left-handed and in mirror-image, in an effort to achieve a state of uncontrolled, unself- conscious thought akin to the Surrealists' Žcriture automatique. In distinction to that process, however, Nesa Gschwend's writings finally defy legibility; the linear text becomes a concurrent image of memory. The second picture is prefaced by the words "I am", a fragmentary sentence later supplemented by an array of adjectives and participles spoken not by the performer herself, but by a female voice emerging from the background. In the last picture, as well, this voice relates scenes from a constantly recurring dream.

The three levels of the performance - the painted image, the scenes enacted and the sounds, noises and words - combine to create a spatial structure that is then slowly rendered dense and replete. In the course of the various stations, the protagonist as it were turns her internal life inside out. What began as an external, active space can be seen becoming the internal or psychic space of the subject. The performance expands upon what the heads have already suggested: it provides a glimpse beneath the skin, behind the outer hull. The performer takes her viewers from the outer course of a life (signified by the empty shoes she has deposited around the space) to the abundant interior of a person as played out in the countenances and revealed in the dream world depicted.

The five stations can only be experienced in a variety of temporal dimensions, whether as a series of phases in a life cycle, as the course of one given day, or as a brief moment. In her work, Nesa Gschwend explores the interstices and interfaces not only in artistic practice and its range of expressions, but primarily in human nature. moments of a person is located in the transition from conscious to unconscious thought and action, from the waking to the dreaming state, from the constancy of a character to the mutability of its moods.

By compressing space, image and sound, Gschwend plumbs the depths that lie beneath the surface of what we designate a "person" - by which we may mean a single individual, but which is at the same time scarcely individual at all: rather, what the term conveys is something general, and thus a collectively valid, collectively experienced phenomenon. (translation Raffael Newman)