Gabrielle Obrist
in conversation with Nesa Gschwend



G.O. Nesa, I am delighted to have this opportunity to find out in detail about Rotations, your current exhibition. I am enthralled by its evocative mixture of performance, video, and vestiges of performance transformed into autonomous works of art.
It also casts new light on some aspects of your heads, on display in the two juxtaposed installations, which I find absorbing. It will be interesting to see what your next moves are as you delve deeper into this faces, something that has preoccupied you regularly for some years now.
I’d like to start our tour with the videos, and then look at them side by side with your immobile works. Each of the two video productions features an excerpt from a performance of yours entitled Rotations. At the same time, the arrangement on the floor here – at the scene of the crime, as it were – seems experimental, like a performance laboratory ready at all times for you to take the next step. Rotting oranges, already besieged by fruit-flies, together with other fruit you have subjected to an artistic transformation and sewn together in the course of the performance, are spread out on a juice-soaked cloth and exude a sweetish perfume. These relics make it clear that what you have set in motion is an organic process. Your performance isn’t over when you leave the room; instead, it continues in your absence through the intermediary of these relics, until everything has been tidied away.
During the performance you are seated on a low chair, virtually disappearing under a big black dress. Your posture, bent almost double and entirely focused on your hands, means that not even your face is properly recognizable. In your video projections, too, you keep the camera trained on your treatment of the oranges.
The two staggered projections of your performance, meanwhile, feature an introductory sequence in which you dig your thumb into the orange to make an indentation along its “equator” before splitting it into two equal parts with your hands, and a subsequent sequence in which you remove the flesh of the fruit before reassembling it. You put the membranes back into the peels and sew them shut with the needle and red thread you have at hand; then, post-op, you abandon these bodies to their fate. Now, the observer of such a procedure cannot help wondering what moves you to treat oranges in this fashion…

N.G. Actually the fact that I happen to use an orange has no meaning at all, because the piece isn’t about the orange, it’s about finding a way to visualize the process of transformation, which takes place continuously, regardless of the orange, at various levels, whether in our bodies, in the form of cellular mutation, or in nature, or between human beings. The very same process repeats itself over and over again: something begins to develop, it rotates, takes on form, is rent asunder, is put together again, transmogrifies, and so on – that’s what interests me. Oranges are an obvious choice because of their beautiful shape, their peel, which reminds me of skin, and their roundness, which gives them the appearance of a little body, or a little head. They also fit perfectly into my hand, and that's how they led me to my gestural language. In the video pieces I am mainly interested in the gestures that keep the process of transformation going, the gestures of holding, pressing, rotating, stroking, scratching the surface until the scratch becomes a cut and then, finally, penetrating into the fruit's soft innards. For me, these are the processes of life, on a small scale.
What motivates me is curiosity. When I see something I want to understand it, to know how it looks inside, what happens when I take it apart. It’s a playful encounter, but at the same time my desire to discover leads inexorably to the destruction of its object. We are always being subjected to this duality: we want to learn about something, and in the process we destroy it. My sewing is a would-be return, a vain attempt to make something whole again. The repaired fruit can never be an orange again; instead it is a little thing subject to a new process, a process which is itself determined in part by my treatment of the fruit: for instance because of the insects that immediately appear, to play their part in the transformation.
In the video installation I work on three levels, with various excerpts and rhythms. The metamorphosis of the orange moves in two directions at once, forwards and backwards, and so the transformations are seamless. The orange is peeled, squeezed, turned inside out and put back together again, ad infinitum.

G.O. So are the bodies lying here, then, which you deliberately do not tidy away but instead abandon to their fate – are they clues to the discoveries you make while doing research in the form of a performance?

N.G. Yes, and I will use them again later on. With an artistic work it is a personal decision which materials you remove from the assembly and turn into a sign for something else. It’s been a week now since I saw "my" oranges, and I am amazed at how much they have changed over that period. They will become a whole new series in the group of transformed objects.

G.O. And yet you also frequently leave the particular process up to chance, as well as what actually crystallizes out of it. So this is a step, an interim point at which you reorient yourself for the rest of the process.
In the performance you are pretty hermetically immersed in yourself, and yet you always perform in front of an audience, not shut away in your studio. What role does the presence of spectators play in your performance?

N.G. It’s a sort of self-exposure. The people who are present shape the performance by way of their presence. They become a part of it.

G.O. So it might be that the piece changes during performance, due to the mood you sense in the room: it could become slower, or differently structured, or take another direction, perhaps. Have you ever gone back to your studio after a performance, or series of performances, like the ones in this exhibition, and started the process again, enriched with the experiences you have had during the performances?

N.G. That’s what happens almost every time. It’s an important part of my work. I take away with me what has happened over the three days of the performances, and continue working on it. It might take me in a whole new direction. I read the traces of the performances, as well as my memories of them, in a new light. The performance itself has dissipated, to live on in my memory and in that of the visitors to the show.

G.O. In the video installation I get the feeling that fleeting moments are being stored away, but in a very precise form. Do you also show these film documents as autonomous works of art?

N.G. Yes. I also show them independently. While they may be part of a larger, more coherent series of pieces, every work of art is ultimately fragmented. When I look at the exhibition here, I always also see the other facets of my work. In the end, I see every piece as representative of itself.

G.O. Do you find the video work becomes more rigorous when you can show it in parallel with objects from the performance?

N.G. Yes indeed, because the tactile objects have a different sensual presence than the projections. The objects are like storage space for temporal processes and transformation.

G.O. I'd like to focus more explicitly on the objects. These dried oranges, relics of the performance, have been processed further, with dyed wax. Arrayed like jewellery on a white “balance beam”, they arouse the viewer’s desire to touch them and to examine them. We are tempted to compare them, and the similarities and differences in their form invite scrutiny.
Why do you treat the oranges to such a peculiar presentation?

N.G. Actually it’s not me who provides viewers with the ultimate appearance of these oranges. Rather, by means of my actions I trigger the formative process, which then proceeds autonomously. Their seam is the essence of the objects that emerge out of the oranges. It is the birthplace of another new process, once again featuring similar gestures repeated with variations: rolling, turning inside out, indenting, rotating, stretching, etc. These are universal processes, analogous at every level; and yet, as these objects make clear, each is entirely distinct.
For me there are various reasons for preserving these processes in wax. Wax is a very warm material, and warmth, after all, or rather energy, is indispensable for metamorphoses, transformations. Wax is a very sensual material, it feels good and I like to work with it, even if I do burn my fingers every now and then. Wax can be found in a wide range of states, as a vapour, as a liquid, and as a solid; in the last case it runs the gamut from soft all the way to stiff and brittle.
I mount these little wax-orange objects at eye level, so that the viewer can get up close to them and study their subtle formal variations. They are intended to be perceived as little bodies, or cells. And if you pick up one of these objects, it seems to nestle itself into your palm quite naturally: seamlessly, as it were.

G.O. For me, their vitality takes centre stage. The structure and pigment of their surface make me think of organs.
The objects are like creatures; in fact, in connection with their transformation, you have likened the oranges to cells dividing. And at the same time these wax bodies also gesture at something morbid, the process of decay, of deformation. So I see the work as caught up in this contradiction, and depending on the way I approach the objects – depending on my mood – I see either the positively encoded aspect, or the conundrum of dissolution they are able to evoke.
N.G. I work with these boundaries quite deliberately. I am very interested in the transformation of energy; in other words, the juice of life, if you like, is still visible here. Repetition plays a central role in these objects. I believe that it is only when they are arrayed like this that the energy stored within them becomes recognizable, the energy that has led to this particular form and no other. The wax bodies resemble each other, and are at the same time very individual. This is something that has preoccupied me for a long time, and which I think is only ostensibly contradictory.

G.O. The installations with the schematic faces are ambivalent in the same way as the objects. In one sense they are delicately rendered visages, ephemeral creatures, often with a supplicating look in their eyes; some of them seem to have been aroused from sleep. And at the same time the observer feels like she is staring down death, as for instance when a subject’s skull shines through the drawing. So many of the pieces are like a memento mori, faces with absent, inward-turned eyes, somewhere halfway between vitality and lifelessness. Thanks to the transparency of your drawings and the way they are installed – they seem to float right off the wall – you have been able to present them as fleeting sketches, disembodied beings. How did you hit on this means of representation, and how do you manage practically to give your nameless portraits this kind of aura?

N.G. The group of pieces shown here is taken from a larger series of portraits I've been working on for years now. If you look carefully at a human head, or touch it, you will notice that it manifests the same indentations and bulges as a cell. When it comes to the face, the eyes are quite central, and at a certain point I started to see those two dark spots as the nuclei of a cell in the process of dividing, and the head as another cell.
Maybe the key to my way with portraits is my attempt to leave physiognomy out of it. And yet I have always been looking for expressions, or situations, that are reflected in faces. If you took a hundred photos of a face very rapidly, you would find that you had images of a hundred different faces, a hundred different expressions, or moments. And it is these fleeting moments I am attempting to bundle and preserve in my portraits. I was searching for a form that would relieve the human face of all data, such as sex, or age, or ethnicity. This is not possible with a photo-portrait.
In order to avoid as much as possible insinuating preconceived images and ideas into my pictures, I draw very quickly, and in series entailing several processes, layer by layer. A crucial layer is, once again, the application of wax. There I have to be quick on my feet, since I can only work as long as the medium is warm. This turns the work process into something ad hoc, a gesture, as in performance. Expression and gesture, after all, are closely interconnected. They are our quintessential means to making ourselves understood, and they are crucial to our survival.
This way, through the material conditions of my work, expression and gesture are as closely bound together as possible. Because of their development in this multi-layered process, my faces are never at rest: they come out to meet their observers, and they recede at the same moment.

G.O. What you draw, and what you then preserve in wax, is the ephemeral quality of mental or spiritual expressions. Once again, you are preserving energy. In the end, your faces are seismographs of a sensibility that resonates with our own sensibility as we gaze at them.

N.G. A central concern of my portraits is the face as interface between inside and outside, both of which are continuously triggering facial movement. This was also my most important work during my three months as “artist in residence” in India. I wanted to find out what that particular place triggered within me, and so I kept doing these portraits, only in pencil. Next I worked according to the same principle in Greece, as well as back home, in my studio and elsewhere. I was surprised myself to learn what effect a place can have on a face, on an expression. And once again, what I was after was variations on similarity, or perhaps difference in the same.
Facial expression is a language all on its own, one that mainly happens unconsciously; by means of my drawing, I hope to gain access to this language without using words. The result is subtle differences, arising from mood, from history, from the various people, a foreign landscape and so on. The portraits done in Greece are much more powerful, in terms of their expression, than those done in India. I didn’t consciously choose what I did, rather I allowed myself to be led from place to place.
Visitor The form of the drawings suggests to me that you didn’t observe them from outside, but instead the other way around, as if you worked from the inside out. It’s like retracting physiognomy to this paper-thin layer, where we are all quite alike. That’s why I see that same ambivalence here too: life and death, but also birth.
G.O. At our last meeting you referred to something embryonic as well. For me, however, the main focus of your work is on transition, the process of metamorphosis from the state of being alive to that of absence. But the drawings of faces can of course also refer to the beginning of life, the point at which physical existence first comes into being, with all its individual features.
Are your large-format works, the central installation in this exhibition, informed by similar thoughts and experiences?

N.G. An important element in the major works, which I call cells, is their inwardness, their veiledness. Materially speaking they are my largest works, and at the same time they begin explicitly with the minuscule, with the cell. Here too I was quite concretely influenced by blood cells, which can also be formally likened to the human head. Together, the large faces on their lengths of fabric create a red space, which I also find hard to name.

G.O. From the outside, and from a certain distance, these lengths of fabric look like facial landscapes, and invite the viewer to explore a topography – but the closer we get, and the more we look at the details, the more we lose ourselves in the abstract pictorial space of their surface. Yours is a very energy-laden, gestural work, and its versatility and developmental process give it a real expressive power. For me, the word cell describes a spatial moment. You must enter this space alone, abandon yourself to it, to your instinctive emotional and physical reactions as you are overwhelmed by the intense red of the space. You might get a sense of security, or you could feel an acute flight reflex, a terrible feeling of distress and oppression. You could compare this cell with an energy field.

N.G. Yes, that's quite evocative. For me, such life or death experiences are totally key. Our life begins in the simultaneity of security and an extreme flight reflex. That’s how we are born, all of us, more or less the same, and yet also quite distinct.
In this installation I am playing on various levels with the inside and the outside. From the outside, at a distance, you perceive an amorphous cellular form, and as you get nearer to the object you immerse yourself visually into this cell, which in turn – the nearer you get – dissolves and becomes a surface, a skin.
Beneath the surface of the installation lies the interior, a further cell. What was behind now comes to the surface, and vice versa. When we are standing here we call this the front, because it happens to correspond to our position at the moment; but when we move it is reversed. The way you perceive of something is always also a question of your own position. In the video projections it is my movement, the image is flat; here, in this installation, it’s the viewer who moves, and thus determines her own rhythm of proximity and distance.

G.O. The dialogue occurs at a whole other level, and the experience is personal.
There’s one last thing I want to talk about. In a previous discussion we discovered our shared affinity for Roland Barthes. You told me that his thought had provided you with important impulses in your artistic work. And you reminded me of a philosophical passage in Barthes’s book Camera Lucida1, from his consideration of “studium” and “punctum”.

N.G. I can’t remember how we wound up talking about him. At any rate, my encounter with his writings was truly pivotal for some time. By “studium” he means technique, all that is formal and encoded, while the “punctum” is whatever cannot be named, a blind field, one which does not, however, stand in the way of studium but instead, when it is present at all, enters into co-existence with it. The punctum is a fracture, a cut, a seam, a little hole, a wound; it is the gap through which a viewer can slip into an image, and out of which an image can open onto a life outside of the image.
Over the past years this has become a key issue in my work. If I cannot find such a wound, such a fracture in my art, I throw it away. If a piece is too unambiguous, not vague enough, then it loses its gap. In a portrait, however, it is precisely this gap which makes it possible for a viewer to turn it into a part of himself. It must at all times remain something intangible, something I do not understand myself.

G.O. So we can understand the “gaps” in your works of art as those places through which we, the viewers, can find a way into the picture. A highly subjective perception can thus arise – the work remains open and mysterious. Personally I also think that an effective work of art needs to contain an uncertainty of this sort, one left untrammeled by the artist, a quality that cannot be forced, whether aesthetically or intellectually. A work of art that lacks such a gap, or moment of consternation, or secret, simply cannot be meaningful. It will not endure.

The conversation took place on 2 September 2007 in Basel.



1Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida 1982