For the first time ever, two large-scale exhibitions will provide an overview of the work of three generations of Zug artists in the media of photography and video.

How we relate to what is near and what is far has always been a central theme in art. Particularly in the sixty years since the Second World War, a period of radical transformation, this has been a perennial topic of discussion requiring constant clarification by artists. The transformation taking place during this period was associated with societal and political changes throughout the world, but also with the new technological developments in communications, transport and the creation of pictorial images. Photography and video are themselves continually undergoing change, and, as mobile, rapid image-creating processes that deal directly with reality, they lend themselves especially well to the enquiry into our relationship with distance and nearness. Not least of all in Zug, which is both an arena and a product of change.

The various approaches adopted by different artists stake out intermediate spaces between what is near and what is far: locations in an in-between zone which, in our mobile, multiple society, we are increasingly accustomed to inhabiting – often without becoming aware of the profound ways in which doing so affects our own sense of identity.

In the years following 1945, for instance, Armin Haab searched in Mexico, and Christian Staub in the circus, for the exotic and alien as the complete antithesis to conventional bourgeois society. In contrast, representatives of the present generation tend to seek out the familiar amid the unfamiliar, looking for social, political, geo-climatic or existential affinities. They may choose actual political boundaries and border regions – whether in northern Finland, along the eastern border of the EU, or in Morocco – as a vantage-point from which to explore the reality of Central Europe.

The “FernNah” exhibitions encompass a broad spectrum of expressive means. Guido Baselgia takes the classical tradition of black and white photography to its ultimate conclusion, using its “objective” qualities to achieve subjectivity. Annelies Štrba’s point of departure is the empty tourist-camera’s-eye view of Venice – reduced to a worn-out cliché by millions of reproductions – which she turns into something dreamlike and existential. For Hannah Villiger, her own body, so near to her, was the fascinatingly strange and remote subject which she tried throughout her life to approach more closely with the aid of her Polaroid camera. Sladjan Nedeljkovic examines the impact of global communications on individuals’ views of themselves and of the world. In inconspicuous, marginal locations along the Schengen border or in Morocco, where the destinies of refugees are played out, Alexander Odermatt makes semi-illegal contact with the anonymous “other,” to which he gives a face with his “artlessly” direct images. In two further studies of in-between spaces, Cécile Yerro Straumann portrays empty benches on the shore of Lake Zug, while Jo Achermann documents the dynamic construction activity in the “Feldhof” district of Zug, the site of a new housing development.

This large and many-faceted exhibition will be realized in two stages, encouraging repeated visits.

With Anna Margrit Annen, Guido Baselgia, Livia Salome Gnos, André Gysi, Armin Haab, Rut Himmelsbach, Christian Staub, Annelies Štrba, Hannah Villiger, Cécile Yerro Straumann