Artists

Baumann, Sabian

Signes et Sentiments, 2021
Courtesy: Galerie Mark Müller, Zürich; (c) Sabian Baumann; Foto: Sandra Pointet

Twenty-six clay hands hang suspended from the ceiling. We see fists bumping one other, untouched fingers, open hands with palms touching horizontally, as though directing energy from top to bottom.
Sabian Baumann’s Signes et Sentiments (2021) is like a social structure in which the objects are sometimes near, sometimes far. At times they repel one another, at others they reach for one another, yet they always refer to one another - and in doing so, engender the titular vibration of things. They are a structure in which intimacy is renegotiated in the face of global crises, just as it has been in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. We
need new forms of affect as much as we need forms of resistance. The upraised fists in the installation pack a newly symbolic punch - not least on account of recent Black Lives Matter protests.
The clay is unfired, their color an earthy neutral. There is freedom in that. It leaves us room to draw our own associations, to fill in the blanks. The objects are a source of possibilities, an undescribed feeling that we could imbue with something terrible or beautiful.
Baumann’s hands are sign systems to which we lack the key. Nevertheless, the work appears marked by a specific structural logic. As such, it fits into Baumann’s oeuvre: one in which drawings and sculptures often operate as reference systems,
acting as vehicles for quotations from pop culture
and theory.
I think of my favorite hand artworks, of the hands of Boychild in Wu Tsang’s performances and videos. Of the Celebrity Lezbian Fists series, for which artist Paige Gratland cast the fists of Eileen Myles, Cheryl Dunye, and others. I’m associating again. These hands are a code pointing to a foreboding future - an index for the world to come.

Text: Eva Tepest; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Twenty-six clay hands hang suspended from the ceiling. We see fists bumping one other, untouched fingers, open hands with palms touching horizontally, as though directing energy from top to bottom.
Sabian Baumann’s Signes et Sentiments (2021) is like a social structure in which the objects are sometimes near, sometimes far. At times they repel one another, at others they reach for one another, yet they always refer to one another - and in doing so, engender the titular vibration of things. They are a structure in which intimacy is renegotiated in the face of global crises, just as it has been in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. We
need new forms of affect as much as we need forms of resistance. The upraised fists in the installation pack a newly symbolic punch - not least on account of recent Black Lives Matter protests.
The clay is unfired, their color an earthy neutral. There is freedom in that. It leaves us room to draw our own associations, to fill in the blanks. The objects are a source of possibilities, an undescribed feeling that we could imbue with something terrible or beautiful.
Baumann’s hands are sign systems to which we lack the key. Nevertheless, the work appears marked by a specific structural logic. As such, it fits into Baumann’s oeuvre: one in which drawings and sculptures often operate as reference systems,
acting as vehicles for quotations from pop culture
and theory.
I think of my favorite hand artworks, of the hands of Boychild in Wu Tsang’s performances and videos. Of the Celebrity Lezbian Fists series, for which artist Paige Gratland cast the fists of Eileen Myles, Cheryl Dunye, and others. I’m associating again. These hands are a code pointing to a foreboding future - an index for the world to come.

Text: Eva Tepest; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Signes et Sentiments, 2021
Courtesy: Galerie Mark Müller, Zürich; (c) Sabian Baumann; Foto: Sandra Pointet