Patrik Fuchs
Songs of Darkness - Songs of Light

Exhibition:
May 13 to June 25, 2022

Opening:
Thursday, May 12, 2022, 18.30h
Introduction by Gwendolyn Fässler, art historian

Artist Talk:
Saturday, May 21, 2022, 15h
Moderated by Vivienne Heinzelmann, art historian & project manager at Network of Arts

Finissage:
Saturday, June 25, 2022, 13-17h

Opening Hours:
Thursday 18-20h
Friday and Saturday 13-17h
or by appointment


Songs of Darkness - Songs of Light
The Vinteuil Sonata is a fictional piece of music from Marcel Proust's novel project "In Search of Lost Time". The novel tells the story of Charles Swann who holds fragmented and dreamlike memories of a sonata composed by the fictional character Vinteuil. With these memories, Swann is reminded of a certain relationship. The sentimentality described in the novel is the author’s attempt at recalling memories of a moment spent with a person (the piano player).
Patrik Fuchs photographically captures placeholders of memories – personal mementos that simultaneously refer to the belonging of a generation and a place – particular moments, which the photographer experienced with his family members.
Fuchs photographed these mementos on a turntable with a long exposure time, causing the outline of these forms to become blurry and to create various streaks of colors that appear like a shadowy memory on the surface of an image.
The blur of one’s own selective and emotionally interwoven memory overlaps with the technical blur of photography. 
The documental quality of the medium photography is taken to one of its limits by capturing hazy memories. By photographing fragments of memory, they turn into accessible sentimental objects. However, memories are formed out of the blur, just like only one note sequence of the sonata in Swann’s memory managed to surface involuntarily. Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff

Ghost Songs
Every time we recall an experience it changes its shape. Our current mood, new insights or opinions, are added to our past impressions. 
The greater and more significant the temporal distance to the original event, the more magical and persuasive its inner resonance becomes. The countless lingering sound of mental souvenirs form the chord to our very own evolutionary history.
Patrik Fuchs listens to that infinite space in which experiences oscillate between dream and reality, where individual character affirms itself and collective myths find their resonating space. For this he uses personal memorabilia:
Family photos, stuffed animals, toys, love letters, pieces of clothing or vacation souvenirs, which spins on a turntable. They are objects of a digital immigrant from the Swiss middle class, which make their circles in front of the camera.
Fuchs' personal-representative selection of objects follows the tradition of time capsules, which tell the future about a vanished present.
The objects remain visible as a bright hum, an impression of the ephemeral. They are photographic soundtracks that transcend the individual. Mood images and visual sound spaces are created, in which the past and the transience of the viewers also find its place and expression. These evoked alien memories in Fuchs’ shots can linger or be absorbed and hurled into that diffuse sphere that surrounds everything remembered and preserves everything forgotten. Fabian Scherrer