Artist from Zürich, Switzerland

Gubler

Imaginary Paradise

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Gubler‘s focus is on the global media, economic and political mechanisms in the context of sustainability issues. The artist reflects on these multi-layered processes using stock footage video material from various databases on the World Wide Web, which he creates as novel, formal-language concentrated moving image collages. The focus here

is on questions of content on the topic of sustainability, which Gubler has always been concerned with personally and which he places in a socio-political context.

In 2015, the world‘s leading politicians adopted 17 joint sustainability goals within the framework of the United Nations, which are to be met by 2030. The aim of the 2030 Agenda is to fight extreme poverty, to improve the living conditions of all people in the long term and permanently, and to protect our planet earth. The Sustainable Development Goals combine three levels of sustainability that are inextricably linked and influence one another - social, environmental and economic.

Matthias Gubler records the sustainability goals outlined above and visualizes them by assigning each member 17 stock footage clips with a duration of one second each, resulting in 3,281 video clips. The total duration of the film is around 60 minutes. The video clips are mixed in random mode and cut one after the other with a hard cut. The video clip is presented on a very small monitor that is fitted with a passe-partout and presented in a large white frame. With the work IMAGINARY PARADISE specially conceived for the exhibition, the artist wants to show that we have always lived in a dream-like, artificial world - more precisely: our conception of the world has always been shaped by media images such as those from stock footage databases . These worlds of images mainly show us impressions of joy, happiness, health, beauty, equality, wealth, eternal youth and many other topics. In a stylized and exaggerated form, these imagery suggest precisely many aspects that the 17 sustainability goals seek to achieve.

The formal language of the work is evident in the rapid cuts of the video material that we are familiar with, which is why it is not possible for us to capture all the images, or even to reflect them first or to put them in connection with one another. Not being able to perceive this moment of perceptual irritation or not being able to perceive a visual conglomerate in its entirety is reinforced by the way the work is presented: The small monitor and the relatively large picture frame, which is provided with a glass, make it impossible to clearly recognize the Moving images all the time and thereby illustrate our always “framed” way of perception. In analogy to the stock footage images supposedly functioning as documentary contemporary witnesses, Gubler succeeds in giving the viewer an already “framed” snapshot of the neoliberalist West.

It is precisely this way of looking at things, which cannot be clearly defined in our perception, that enables the video collages to have further layers of meaning. Don't we all know this feeling? You want to step forward, and yet you always seem to be stepping in the same place, somehow you just can't move forward. Past, present and future merge into a seemingly indistinguishable whole. If we have set ourselves a goal, want to get there with all possible means and seem to fail over and over again, to stand still, then the moment seems to have come when we rest in ourselves, concentrate on the essentials and ourselves reflect. This is exactly what Gubler's moving images make perceptible and questions such as “Can't we give some of our wealth to others? Is the resolution just a sham and is it supposed to distract from our guilty conscience? Are we doing really well or shouldn't new goals be formulated for us? "

We are all part of this world, we should all think about a sustainable life in a self-reflective and individual way, and even if nothing seems to be moving, nothing seems to develop into a better world - the images move inexorably.

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