Nadine Olonetzky – författare

When an apple falls to the ground, we see the effect of gravity. Yet not all laws of nature are as apparent. Swiss artist Barbara Ellmerer uses invisible principles of physics, biology, and cosmology as her starting point and translates them into paintings. She sends us into the realm of colours and shapes in which forces, movements, and processes from nature are synonymously realised and palpable. Ellmerer thereby also captures something inexplicable, which reminds us of how steeped in wonder the world still is.Barbara Ellmerer - Sense of Science presents a selection of oil paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2010 and 2020. Ellmerer’s sometimes large-format pictures are shown both in full as well as in enlarged details to show the intricacies of her brush stroke, colour qualities, surfaces, depths, movements, and emphases. This combination also makes productive use of the migration of media - from painting to photography - and its reproduction in the book. In an accompanying essay, Laura Corman, a quantum physicist, explains how Ellmerer’s art relates to natural science. A contribution by Nadine Olonetzky, culture journalist and photo expert, describes art’s capabilities of rendering invisible processes comprehensible.Text in English and German.

Transformation processes are the focus of Georg Aerni’s new photographs. The Swiss photographer and artist shows plastic greenhouses that have annexed whole swathes of land for agricultural mass production, residential houses that have been built overnight on the city outskirts without construction machines and literally noiselessly. He points his lens at olive trees that have grown over centuries into figures full of character, at creepers that conquer leftover spaces between high-rises and motorways, and at mighty rock faces that are being gnawed by erosion. With the merging of art and documentation that is typical of Aerni’s work, Georg Aerni—Silent Transition makes the signs of change the object of a contemplative observation and at the same time asks challenging questions: about our handling of natural resources, about the social backgrounds to cities growing out of control, about the regenerative force of nature.A decade after Aerni’s first monograph, Sites & Signs, this new book showcases the artist’s ongoing continuation of his photographic work through numerous individual images as well as new series. 166 beautiful colour and black-and-white plates are introduced through texts by Peter Pfrunder and Nadine Olonetzky and commented on with an essay by Sabine von Fischer.Text in English and German.

Die Familie ihrer Mutter hinterlässt Erinnerungen, Erbstücke und Geschichten. Von der jüdischen Familie des Vaters bleibt lediglich ein kleines Foto. Nur ein einziges Mal erzählt ihr der Vater von dem, was während der Shoah mit ihm und seiner Familie geschehen ist. Da ist sie fünfzehn, und ihr Vater mittlerweile Grafiker und Amateurfotograf, der alles festhalten muss, bevor es verschwindet. Jahrzehnte später stößt sie auf Berge von Akten und erfährt, was ihre Eltern so lange vor ihr geheim gehalten hatten.»Wo geht das Licht hin, wenn der Tag vergangen ist« erzählt unsentimental und poetisch davon, wie man Verlust nicht wiedergutmachen, aber behutsam sichtbar machen kann.»Dass diese Familiengeschichte aus mehr Fragen als Antworten besteht, macht sie so universell und lässt uns darin auch unsere eigenen Familien erkennen.« Peter Stamm

Cat Tuong Nguyen has over the past ten years gained significant recognition for a highly individual, intelligent and poetic work. Photographs, collages, painted-over pictures from magazines form together a cosmos of images of great visual and substantial power. Nguyen confronts the viewer with strange, humourous and mysterious things and investigates our everyday reality. He takes-up political and social aspects and events, and he investigates the emotional world of the individual searching for its way in everyday reality. Nguyen's images, playful as they seem to be in some cases, are based on fundamental experiences, such as emigration, integration in a new world and the outsider's view of an alien culture and society. "Underdog Suite" is the first large book on Nguyen's art. It comprises nearly the complete oeuvre of this extraordinary young artist, his own selection of images arranged in an unconventional, highly original manner. It is not a mere monographic overview, it is rather the artist's self-portrait in the shape of a book. Two essays investigate Nguyen's ideas, concepts and artistic method. This title includes text in English and German.

Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years.Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo: each metropolis is also a zone where mankind's will to create is driving constant change. Aerni documents this change in a scrupulously prepared and carefully designed series of images. But also when he focuses on receding glaciers in the Alps, his studies of cages in zoological gardens and of mankind's interventions in nature, the extraordinary carefulness and quality inherent to all of Aerni's work is captivating. It sets his oeuvre in sharp contrast to the quickly done, impromptu photography that has become so widespread in recent years.Sites and Signs is the first comprehensive monograph on Aerni's photographic work. The book presents his complete work with an emphasis on the most recent series. Essays on his work in the context of contemporary photography and on images of architecture and landscape, and a complete catalogue of Aerni's oeuvre so far round out the book.Text in English & German.

For more than 20 years, photographic artist Tobias Madörin has been working on his series Topos. Metropolises like Barcelona and São Paulo, a Swiss mountain resort like Grindelwald, or foreign countries like Uganda, Indonesia and Japan: with his large scale images he explores dwellings and landscapes. Madörin creates tableaux, similar to 19th-century painters. His particular interests are places where people gather, places on the outskirts of cities along arterial roads, waste disposal sites, or areas changed and scarred by agriculture and mining. He understands such places as products of human visions and ideals, but also as result of exploitation and greed, as sites of fight for survival.Tobias Madörin - Topos is the first monographic book on Madörin's work, presenting his most important pictures from twenty years. An essay by the journalist and art critic Nadine Olonetzky comments Madörin's oeuvre and puts it in context of contemporary photography and the history of representing landscapes and cities.Text in English & German.

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth.In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also capture the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth's shadow thrown into space.The new book Guido Baselgia - Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors.Text in English and German.

Haiti has long been known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption. Even before the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the country, it was beset by difficulties inextricably rooted in its history of rebellion and revolution. Since gaining independence from France in 1804, following the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world, Haiti's past has been characterised by dictatorships, serious conflict, and near-constant social and political unrest, as the country struggles to define its independence and realise its potential.Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation collects some 140 of photographs of Haiti by Swiss photographer Thomas Kern, taken in black and white with an analogue camera over the course of twenty years of travel there. As the photographs demonstrate, the people of Haiti remain passionate about their home in the face of crushing poverty and crisis. Behind the barrage of bad news that dominates the public image it is a country full of hope and life. The photographs, which make up the first part of a four-part boxed set, are joined by three separate text booklets each in one of three languages: English, German, and Creole. These feature texts by Kern on his work and approach to the country, as well as two essays by Swiss journalist Georg Brunold and Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens, which provide context and commentary for the images and discuss the country's people and culture, and its enduring political conflict.A powerful photographic portrait, Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation shows a different, more personal and therefore also more 'ordinary' view of the troubled country that reaches beyond what we think we know about Haiti.Accompanies the exhibition Thomas Kern Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation at Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur (17 September 2016 to 29 January 2017).Text in English, German, and Creole.

Swiss photographer Roland Iselin, born 1958, graduated from the famous photography class at the School of Design in Zurich (today Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and also completed a Master's degree at New York's School of Visual Arts. Prior to his artistic education, he completed his studies in socio-cultural animation at Zurich-based Institute of Applied Psychology.Unguided Road Trip is Iselin's latest long-term project. Since 2011, he has been travelling his native Switzerland and his adopted second home country, the US, documenting how in either place the landscape is 'furnished' with all sorts of structures and objects. Bus stops, public toilets, gas stations. We recognise such things and make use of the convenience they offer, yet we forget about them again immediately. In small and densely populated Switzerland, the landscape is cluttered with objects that serve a specific purpose: phone and letterboxes, benches, signposts, wayside crosses. But equally, the vast and scarcely inhabited open landscapes in the US are cut-across by roads lined by mass-produced objects.Iselin has found many motifs common in both countries: memorials for victims of road accidents, cattle gates, rifle ranges with their pavilions, rest stops. A landscape's 'furniture' does not accumulate accidentally. Rather, each object is placed intentionally, and they testify, in a way, to a society's state. Iselin's images demonstrate values and ideals, showing how the design of these objects guides our behavior.This new book brings together some 140 photographs from Iselin's Unguided Road Trip, for the first time. The images are complemented with texts by writer and photography critic Nadine Olonetzky.Text in English and German.