Christian Knörr

"Reine Claude" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, installation view, Bienne

Reine Claude is the name of a person as well as a species of plum. The historic person had an eponymous effect on the green plum. The french queen Reine Claude only reached the age of 26 but gave birth to 8 children. On paintings of her time her face seems to have a greenish tone.
Claude is both, a boy's and a girl's name — while the boy's version's more frequent I personally prefer the sound of it for a girl.
Copper conducts, it connects places and carries sounds. Cloth is a membrane — here bleu royal. Text can be heard as music or be seen as light. Reine Claude is a common work of 2 artists connecting 2 places, dealing with 2 soundtracks. One of the slide-projected handwritings says: Diaphan, Adiaphan.

"Reine Claude" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, installation view, Bienne

"Reine Claude — In The Middlewest" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, audio track

"Reine Claude" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, installation view, Bienne

"Reine Claude" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, projected text fragments

"Reine Claude" with Deirdre O'Leary, 2015, installation view, Bienne

"Dinge" 2015, photograph

"Things" — "The unswept floor" (asarotos oikos) is a Pompeii mosaic depicting leftovers of a meal in a tromp l'œil manner. Apparently, tromp l'œil debris was a popular Hellenistic and Roman mosaic theme for dining room floors.
I'm observing my housekeeping as if it was a body: it's not a closed system, things enter and things leave, whereas the things leaving differ from those entering. Besides dirty water, stale air, house dust, etc., garbage is such a "thing" leaving my household. When I toss my garbage in the air and capture it photographically with a short exposure time, I get funny images of randomly composed multicolored pieces that constitute my private refuse.

"Dinge" 2015, photograph

"Dinge" 2015, installation view, Basel

"Sony" 2012, adhesive label

When Sony launched the strapline "make believe" in 2009, a Financial Times article pointed out the ambiguity of these two words — in what way the promotion of progressively perfected medial illusion can be seen as pure critique, likewise.
It's not difficult to recognize a dark side within some slogans — as Patrón Tequila puts it — to distinctively reverse the signs without modifying the words at all.

"Patrón Tequila" 2012, adhesive label

"L'Oréal" — "Sony" — "Patrón Tequila" 2015, studio installation

"Angoisse" 2013, advertising poster, Zürich

"Angoisse" is a broad advertising campaign for a female perfume, comprising vertical and horizontal ad posters, a newspaper advertisement, a cinema publicity clip and a website. The wearer of "Angoisse" is described within the campaign as "fearless, seductive and sophisticated" — referring to existentialist concepts as evoked by angoisse, the french word for anxiety and angst.
In a second stage, the various ad-artefacts of "Angoisse" are used as raw material for an appropriation-based installation dealing with the modernist aesthetic of perfume booths in luxury malls

"Angoisse" 2013, advertising poster, Zürich

"Angoisse" 2013, advertising film, Basel

"Angoisse" 2013, installation view, Bienne

"Lieux" 2010 - 2015, photograph

After the Google vehicle lurked through the streets, a white cross will appear at the very spot where it shot in all directions, later, in the online depiction of that street. The images are produced at regular intervals, in high density and in an almost world-spanning extent. No individual person would be up to this task, nobody could imitate such a corporate and automated action. And presumably nobody might be interested in doing so. But, as a consequence, individual streetscapes, made by tourists for instance, are exposed to a comparison even though there's no comparable intention behind the images.
In the work Lieux — french for places — streetscapes are seen in a personalized way in different cities over diverse countries and being translated into dozens of photographs. There's no indications to where and when the images have been shot. After this transfer of the place into the photograph, the "place" is no no longer to be found on site but in its depiction.

"Lieux" 2014, installation view, Freiburg

"Flotsam Display" 2015, studio installation

Things that move freely — any consolidation of their erratic constellation implicates a violation of their very own nature. To display things means to flatten them, to cut them off their timeline. Displays have a very limited spatial depth behind the so-called fourth wall. Things appearing in the display's flattened space tend to be taken for an image.

"Flotsam Display" 2015, studio installation

"The Quantitative Distribution and Characteristics of Neuston Plastic in the North Pacific Ocean, 1985 - 88" 2015, photocopies in polyethylene foil

A red plastic folder as a semitransparent cloth, jacketing the body of a 1988 scientific paper. Polyethylene foils are sensitive to ultraviolet radiation and crumple down to pieces after long exposure to sunlight. The folder's red corresponds precisely to the fiery red used for every collection between 1985 and 88 by fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Scientific papers of past decades often resemble something like the draft of a novel or a screenplay by their seemingly un-designed appearance, the specific charm of their layout and typeface. Within a new visual context these documents undergo a fetishistic transformation that detaches them strongly of their primary textual value.

"Woodpile" 2014, limited edition publication for "I never read", Art Book Fair Los Angeles

"Woodpile" is a publication of two copies containing black and white photographs. On its cover it says: "A woodpile on a border strip between two European countries — a stack of forestry oddment." The stack has been photographed with the highest possible (digital) resolution available at the time (2013, 80MP), although the image's focussed on a banal, seemingly irrelevant subject. The required equipment for such hi-resolution images is usually reserved for high-cost productions, such as ad campaigns or fashion photos.
In this edition, the everyday scenes are combined with lines from Gustave Flaubert's "Bouvard et Pécuchet", describing disastrous failures in the arts of gardening culture by the two protagonists.

"Woodpile" 2014, limited edition publication for "I never read", Art Book Fair Los Angeles

"Song 3" 2005, mobile-phone video

A melody announcing an approaching dustcart recurs constantly, bin women swarm out and withdraw continually. The partially showcased cyclical movement of production, consumption and disposal is accompanied by a cute little tune.

"Staub unter meinem Bett" 2012, photograph

"Dust under my bed" The production of domestic dust bunnies is a rapid, constant and loose shaping process — here unveiled five days after the most recent dusting. House dust usually consists of about eighty percent dandruff, then textile fibers, hair, living and dead dust mites and their faeces.

"Autoroute 2014", limited edition publication for "I never read", Art Book Fair Tokyo

Conceptual artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder accomplished 119 small-format oil paintings of Swiss highways in the 1990s, referring, in style and quantity, to the aesthetics of Sunday painters. By using photography, these views are retransferred to what lay before the fake Sunday painter's easel, approaching another middle-class stereotype: the postcard. The photographs are superposed with text fragments reciting the moans of a Québecois separatist referring to Swiss highways.

"Autoroute 2014", limited edition publication for "I never read", Art Book Fair Tokyo

"Mehr Als Genug" 2013, audio track

"More than enough" An image composed of small colored dots; a text describing the image; an actor reading the text; a microphone recording her in stereo. The colored dots have a life their own.

"Mehr Als Genug" 2013, perfomed by Dagny Gioulami, Bern

"Greta" 2012, advertising poster, Zürich

The average career of a professional photo model ends at age 28, maybe 30. In a series of traditional studio photographs girls at this stage of career are portrayed, in their personal clothes. Each portrait consists of a sequence of images shot in a very short timespan, imitating the strike-the-pose-rhythm of commercial image productions.
One of these portraits, the one of Czech model Greta, hung on an official downtown billboard re-introducing Greta's post-commercial face into the advertising context — without promoting a product.

"Greta" 2012, advertising poster, Zürich

"Novartis" 2015, contribution to a collective crossword for Mousse magazine, June 2015