This installation presents fragments from a narrative. The story concerns the fictional State Art Academy Zurich (SKZ). The glass table holds three issues of “Art Student Life,“ the student lifestyle magazine, as well as a postcard from the art school and some photographs of students. The magazines and postcards are dated 1995, but the impression is of an earlier but indeterminate time in the mid-20th century. The magazine and postcards are written in Swiss-German dialect. This is one of several clues to their inauthenticity. Swiss-German is widely spoken but has no standard orthography and is not generally written down.
The video on the opposite wall presents a first person account told by a graduate of the program. She recounts her memories of a fellow student whose idiosyncrasies made a deep impression on her. She speaks in Swiss-German dialect. The image behind the subtitles shows a brutalist cement building meant to represent the art school.
The centerpiece of the installation is a “Student Painting Storage Cabinet“ taken from the art school. It contains 18 black monochrome paintings which represent the final project by the students in the Painting Workshop, held each year in Room 17 of the art school. The workshop is the culmination of the program and each student completes a black monochrome painting before graduating. This is not an assigned project or something that is forced on them. They arrive at this conclusion after two years of study with their professors and group discussion with their peers.
Each painting is 2A0 in size allowing it to fit into the cabinet. 2A0 is a standard international paper size. It has a surface area of 4 square meters. The meter was originally conceived as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second but it is now defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. 2A0 is 32 times the size of an international standard sheet of A4 office paper and has the same ratio of 1: √2. This is called a “silver ratio“ and it is the only rectangle that can be folded in half to produce another rectangle with the same proportions. The magazines are A4 size and the postcards are 1/4 of that: A6.