Maya Schweizer, Sebastian Jung: En Route

Beyond the subjective, things start to get complicated.

Sebastian Jung goes out onto the street and exposes himself to an incalculable risk. The risk of meeting other people. He draws on the spot, observes and prefers to go into situations in which it is clearly noticeable and visible that there are differences to his own reality of life. At the lateral thinkers’ demo and in the shopping centre, he creates sketches and portraits with quick strokes. Sebastian Jung’s gaze is unprejudiced and in search of prototypical scenes and figures. The drawings on DinA5 document rather than reveal or dramatise anything. But there is also tension in the air. In a second series of works, people are painted in strong colours, almost all of them wear a mask, none of the figures radiates cheerfulness. The agitation of the world after almost two years of pandemic is palpable. In these portraits and the confrontation with the strangers on the street, Jung gives space to the ambivalence that affects us all, when worlds lie between inside and outside.

Maya Schweizer embroiders associative stories and text fragments into the fabric in loose stitches. Language is a medium of understanding and yet never achieves objective validity. The words evoke memories and trigger emotions, but in Maya Schweizer’s textile assemblages a stringent narrative does not really become tangible. The fabric falls in uneven folds, the letters dance out of line and the threads do not tighten. “N’importe quelle petite chose fait une conversation” (Every little thing creates a conversation). The change of languages further complicates the conditions.

So what is the point of writing and speaking if we may not understand each other? Why not instead assume that everything that is said is true or nothing? Or do both: make multiple connections and put the doubt itself into words. “Either a babble of voices or nothing at all” reads a sentence on the wall hanging. Maya Schweizer does not give priority to any single voice or statement. The complexity of human understanding is presented to us as fragile, ambivalent and always also processual.

Maya Schweizer and Sebastian Jung both choose the subjective gaze as the starting point of their artistic works. From there, their interest is directed towards the mechanisms of social interaction. En Route – being on the road and in motion makes it possible to experience the world beyond the subjective in its ambivalence and plasticity.

[Arne Linde, 2022]