A conversation with art critic and Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers
co-director Mathilde Villeneuve, as well as an essay by Kunsthaus
Zürich curator Mirjam Varadinis offer an overview of
Jérôme Leuba's work and its relationship to the public realm.
The book also includes a short narrative “remembrance” by the
French filmmaker and author Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
After producing many videos and films, Swiss artist Jérôme
Leuba (born 1970 in Geneva, lives and works in Geneva and Berlin) has built
a substantial corpus of “living” artworks entitled
"battlefield." As such, these works create or describe zones of tension by
employing codes of representation that challenge the meaning these images
might bear. His battlefields do not only address zones of power conflicts,
but also the very personal struggles we might experience when confronted
with his scenarios. For instance “battlefield #19/if you see something
say something” (2005) takes the form of a simple intervention in
public space: a piece of luggage left inconspicuously in a corner of the
museum, an act that since 9/11 has lost its innocence … Many of
Leuba's works are thus dealing with anxiety, collective feelings, and mass
behaviors.
