veranstaltet von Corner College Axelle Stiefel Stan Iordanov BPS und anderen Geräuschen // * hosted by Corner College Axelle Stiefel Stan Iordanov BPS and other noises

eine Ausstellung von Axelle Stiefel // An exhibition by Axelle Stiefel

4 February – 4 March 2018

Opening // Eröffnung: 4 February 2018, 18:00

Opening Hours // Öffnungszeiten
Thu/Fri/Sat 16:00 h – 19:00 h
or by appointment
Do/Fr/Sa 16:00h – 19:00 h
oder nach Vereinbarung

Ein Festmahl war es, ohne Frage,
Nichts fehlte, was das Herz begehrt,
Doch plötzlich wurde das Gelage
Im besten Zuge jäh gestört.

Ein Lärm von draußen, welch ein Schrecken!
Es poltert an des Saales Tür.


In the context of this exhibition, see the conversation with Axelle Stiefel by Dimitrina Sevova (also printable as PDF, 3.20MB).

And a short text by Stan Iordanov about his sound piece in the exhibition (also printable as PDF, 59KB).



Das Projekt ist Teil der Corner-College-Plattform Transferenzen: Die Funktion der Ausstellung und Performativer Prozesse in Kunstpraktiken – Fragen der Teilnahme, initiiert von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth.

The project is part of the Corner College platform Transferences: The Function of the Exhibition and Performative Processes in the Practices of Art – Questions of Participation, initiated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls! 2017

Zine launch

Für gute Laune sorgt Musik, ausgesucht von / For our good mood, music selected by Anne Käthi Wehrli und / and Monica Germann

Mit Beiträgen von / With contributions by
Tonjaschja Adler, Madeleine Amsler, Ariane Andereggen, Nicole Bachmann, Martina Baldinger, Nadja Baldini, Mirjam Bayerdörfer, Marina Belobrovaja, Sofia Bempeza, Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Klara Borbély, Johanna Bruckner, Patricia Bucher, Sarah Burger, Françoise Caraco, Bettina Carl, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Teresa Chen, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, member of RELAX, data | Auftrag für parasitäre* Gastarbeit, Brigitte Dätwyler, Kadiatou Diallo, Bettina Diel, Mo Diener, Quynh Dong, Marianne Engel, Klodin Erb, Anne-Laure Franchette, Anna Francke, Ipek Füsun, Monica Germann, Clare Goodwin, Co Gründler, Gabriela Gründler, Sabine Hagmann, Marianne Halter, Andrea Heller, Samia Henni, Seda Hepsev, Anke Hoffmann, Cathérine Hug, Patricia Jacomella, Monica Ursina Jäger, Sophie Jung, Anastasia Katsidis, Yasmin Kiss, Sandra Knecht, Verica Kovacevska, Isabelle Krieg, Sandra Kühne, Georgette Maag, Julia Marti, Federica Martini & Petra Elena Köhle, Angela Marzullo, Mickry 3, Maya Minder, Rayelle Niemann, Caroline Palla, Ursula Palla, Katherine Patiño Miranda, Leila Peacock, Linda Pfenninger, Cora Piantoni, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud , Maria Pomiansky, Elodie Pong, Isabel Reiss, Marion Ritzmann, Ana Roldán, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Dorothea Rust, Eliane Rutishauser, Margit Säde, Saman Anabel Sarabi, Julie Sas, Lisa Schiess, Annette Sense, Dimitrina Sevova, Francisca Silva, Veronika Spierenburg, Vreni Spieser, Claudia Spinelli, Marion Strunk, Milva Stutz, Una Szeemann, Lena Maria Thüring, Yota Tsotra, Jana Vanecek, Anne Käthi Wehrli, Nives Widauer, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, Angela Wittwer, Sophie Yerly.

Zinesters / editors: Nadja Baldini, Dimitrina Sevova, Tanja Trampe

Prepress by code flow / Dimitrina Sevova & Alan Roth

Herausgegeben von / Published by Corner College Press, 2018

ISBN 978-3-033-06183-5

Auflage / Print run: 450

Seiten / Pages: 226

Die Einleitung in voller Länge samt Verzeichnis der Beiträge findet sich auf unserer Materialien-Webseite.

The complete intro including a list of contributions can be found on our materials website.


[Deutsch unten]
The Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls is an artistic response to the International Women’s Day 2017 that came in a highly turbulent global situation and was one of the most political International Women’s Days. We have found ourselves in our localities sensing translocally. With the Zine we catch an “atmospheric flux,” undertake an experiment in “how to get taken up by the motion of a big wave” of women’s protest on a global scale. We want to move instead of being ordered into something. We want to do something in common, to come together, being many and so different, to make feminist media urgent and her voice heard.

[English above]
Das Zine – to March, Clandestine Life of the BoycottGiiirls ist eine künstlerische Antwort auf den Internationalen Frauentag von 2017. Dieser fand in einer global turbulenten Situation statt und war einer der politischsten Frauentage überhaupt: Wir haben in der je eigenen Lokalität translokal empfunden. Mit der Herausgabe des Zine wollen wir diesen «atmosphärischen Fluss» einfangen, indem wir das Experiment wagen und erproben, «wie man von der Bewegung einer grossen Welle» von Frauenprotesten im globalen Massstab «erfasst wird». Wir wollen uns bewegen und nicht in etwas hineingedrängt werden. Wir wollen zusammenkommen, etwas Gemeinsames tun, Viele sein und zugleich verschieden, wollen feministische Medien dringlich und ihre Stimme hörbar machen.

eine Veranstaltung im Corner College, die Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nora Schmidt, Sally Schonfeldt, Axelle Stiefel, Martina-Sofie Wildberger und Dimitrina Sevova zusammenbringt, um ein kollaboratives Feld pluraler Performativität zu eröffnen, einschliesslich singulärer Interventionen, Filmvorführungen und Performances, danach eine Diskussion zwischen den Künstlerinnen, der Kuratorin und dem Publikum.

an event at Corner College that brings together Nicole Bachmann, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nora Schmidt, Sally Schonfeldt, Axelle Stiefel, Martina-Sofie Wildberger, and Dimitrina Sevova to open up a collaborative field of plural performativity, encompassing singular interventions, screenings and performances and followed by a discussion between the artist, the curator and the audience.



[Text unten / Text below]



Nicole Bachmann

Personare Part II

Screening of the video documentation of the performance Personare Part II at Tenderpixel, London on 20 January 2018.



This performance examines the relationship between language, voice and power. Negotiating the materiality of speech and gestures, it investigates the power of the disembodied voice and its relationship to other bodies and find agency in this relationality. The piece deals with questions around the constitution of subjectivity and becoming an active agent through language both in a political or civil sense.

It is important to mention the set up of the performance: the gallery consists of a ground floor space and a lower ground floor gallery, connected with a tight staircase. The audience was led downstairs where the dancers were in place. The actor was upstairs, unknown to the audience. They would only hear her voice.

The performance is based on rehearsed improvisation, by which I mean there was a script and a choreography but each time the piece would be different through the interaction between the three performers.

The piece is about how we can each find a language, a form of expression through different means, by language as well as an embodied vocabulary.

Performed by Anna Procter, Patricia Langa and Sonya Frances Cullingford.

Dance choreography by Patricia Langa.



Delphine Chapuis Schmitz

poems fRom our time(s)

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz will be reading from a collection of texts she is currently working on under the title poems fRom our time(s), and will give a short presentation of her practice at the crossroads of visual art and experimental writing.



Nora Schmidt

Journal/Blog (2011-today)

Reading with a selection of short texts from the artist's Journal/Blog (2011-today).





Sally Schonfeldt

On the Politics of Present Thought

Experimental film. 8′




Axelle Stiefel

Codex Operator
Sound performance. 20′





Martina-Sofie Wildberger

I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING

Performance, Improvisation. About 13′

Text: Martina-Sofie Wildberger, I want to say something (printable as PDF, 17KB)





Endless Conversation – Spacing! enacts a performative and conversational setup to test the aesthetic and political conditions of sharing, which inevitably involves an inoperative spacing, intervaling, and displacing. This in-betweenness is the condition of taking place and the mechanism of giving meaning. “Sharing is itself the origin,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy in Being Singular Plural, sharing according to language exposes singular plurality to interrogate this openness toward the infinity of performative language games and endless scholarship – “the circulation of a meaning of the world that has no beginning or end”, which is the condition of every engaged and committed conversation from a being to a being.

With this event we are looking forward to the potentiality of a new performative that has to be continuously rehearsed, re-enacted, exercised, and practiced, sharing infinite language ‘conversations’ that go into affective registers and intensive qualities. Singular plurality lies at the heart of the discourse concerned with the political and aesthetic potentiality of language, into which this event intervenes, involving the somatic quality of voices and deconstructive/uncompleted gestures, inflections, movements of bodies and production of spaces – “or sometimes it takes place through a shift in tone or modulation of voice,” (Judith Butler) or just spacing, intervaling, displacing.

At the limit of presentation, the event tests how art is a matter of differing/deferring, a coming-into-presence involving “the simultaneity of all presences that are with regard to one another, where no one is for oneself, without being for others.” (Nancy) In Endless Conversation – Spacing!, presentation is distinct from the representation of art. With the live event and vivid conversation, it aims to reflect on art in terms of spacing / interval / displacement in the relation between the politics of language and embodied practices, “a certain displacement in time and space that constitutes the condition of knowing.” (Judith Butler) These dislocated elements of shared language produce other spaces of knowledge, with their particular aesthetics.

The event is part of the curatorial research by Dimitrina Sevova, On the Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Affect – Thinking of Art Beyond Representation in Contemporary Art Practices and Production, a qualitative curatorial research that maps out a cluster of artistic positions and reflects on their practices by means of relational and analytical techniques, from the perspective of the affective politics of the performative and the politics and aesthetics of language, conceptualizing further the relation between contemporary art, plural performativity, and the singular plural.

The research explores the potentiality of language as an artistic material and reflects on the relation between the performative and performance, practices and discourse, in voice-based and text-oriented art practices. It further discusses and analyses, in close collaboration with the artists, how artists do things with words, textuality and space – a flux of art practices that generate ‘concepts in the wild,’ in the sense that they venture beyond the conformity of the well-known and of conventional representation into ambiguous space and unpredictable experiments, pursuing other avenues and producing temporalities and unexpected encounters. The research asks how they relate a politics of place and the possibilities of language in the trajectory of the plural performative as a proliferation of difference. This research is concerned with art practices and the artists’ process of making, rather than their representational contexts.

The curatorial research reflects the role of language in contemporary art, and artistic practices that form a critical fabulation and involve other experimental forms of artistic research that bring together aesthetic practices and knowledge production. The main objective of this research is to ask how art produces knowledge by other means and opens onto a new ethico-aesthetic paradigm. The focus of my research is on artists whose practices and aesthetics embody a materialism of alterity and the translatability at the heart of the unpredictability of an event, testing the limits of how language can articulate the body and the space.

The artistic positions are selected for their experimental approach to language and voice-based practices, the inventive and critical way they work with performative strategies, and how they deal with the system of circulation and collection of information, with knowledge production and the aesthetics of affect, and operate within expanded discursive fields. I would not want to split a certain flux of practices and artists into generations. Because of this, the research is situated across what is defined as a generation. The artists and their practices are approached not as insulated cases in a monographic framework, which would have focused on individual art works or an artistic oeuvre. Rather, my aim is to give, through the research, a sense of a vibrant art scene of resonating practices and overlapping contexts. For me, it is more important to map and reflect on how they are related and shared in certain approaches and trajectories in their work. I did a series of interviews, conversations face to face, and studio visits, and followed the artists in different public activities during the period of the research.

The focal point of the curatorial selection in the process of mapping is a new generation of Swiss artists who work with language and the aesthetics of affect. Their practices can no longer be considered peripheral to the system of art, or alternative, on the edge of the art institutional context, as they form a new and fascinating direction in contemporary art. At the same time, the research emphasizes the differences in practices amid the cluster of selected artists, and the shift in the means of production in contemporary art at large, and its context as it has expanded into sociality, politics and daily life.

There is an upcoming modest publication, composed of an analytico-reflective text that sums up my curatorial reflections, insights, encounters. It will be accompanied by the collected documentation, and conversations and interviews with the selected artists recorded in the context of this research.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova, 2018




This project is supported by a curatorial research grant of Pro Helvetia.

Friday, 16 March – Sunday, 22 April 2018

Öffnungszeiten // Opening Hours

Do/Fr/Sa 16:00h – 19:00h
oder nach Vereinbarung (geschlossen am Karfreitag, 30. März)

Thu/Fri/Sat 16:00 h – 19:00 h
or by appointment (closed on Good Friday, 30 March)



[English below]

Aufbauend auf einer von Umberto Eco zusammengestellten Liste von Engelsnamen, ist From Abdizuel to Zymeloz eine Installation aus vierhundertzehn Stoffstreifen, die von weiss bis schwarz reichen und das ganze Farbspektrum durchlaufen. Jeder Streifen ist mit dem Namen eines Engels bestickt. Vierhundertzehn Muster davon, wie die Dinge sein könnten – Farbton, Textur, Druckmuster oder monochrome Fläche, lichtdicht oder durchsichtig, glatt oder geriffelt. Wenn ein Kind einen Namen erhält, werden traditionell vor der Geburt zwei Listen erstellt. Hier gibt es nur eine.

[Deutsch oben]

Based on a list of the names of angels compiled by Umberto Eco, From Abdizuel to Zymeloz is an installation made of four hundred and ten pieces of fabric ranging from white to black and passing through the entire color spectrum. Each piece is embroidered with an angel’s name. Four hundred and ten samples of what things could be like – hue, texture, printed pattern or monochrome surface, opaque or transparent, smooth or striated. When a child is named, two lists are traditionally composed before the birth. Here there is only one.



Eröffnung // Opening: Friday, 16 March 2018, 18:00 h
With a short introduction by Donatella Bernardi and a lecture-performance by Nicola Genovese: It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone

Read more…



Thursday, 29 March 2018, 19:00h: After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca
With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Elisabeth Joris and Sally Schonfeldt

Read more…



Saturday, 21 April 2018, 14:00h: Dependency relationship: does feminism need separatism and / or art?
With contributions by Laura Iamurri, Quinn Latimer, Federica Martini and Angela Marzullo

Read more…



Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung und der Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung and the Georges und Jenny Bloch-Stiftung.

Opening: Friday, 16 March 2018, 18:00 h
With a short introduction by Donatella Bernardi and a lecture-performance by Nicola Genovese: It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone

Donatella Bernardi (b. 1976 in Geneva, Switzerland), artist, gives a brief introduction to her project From Abdizuel to Zymeloz, which takes into consideration the site-specificity of Corner College and includes a debate on the current state of feminism, based on various Italian sources.

Nicola Genovese is an artist and musician from Venice, Italy. He lives and works in Zurich and graduated from ZHdK in 2017 with an MA Fine Arts. He mainly works with installation and performance.

It’s not about power, it’s about control. It’s not about power, it’s about comfort zone. The male fear of losing power and the anxiety this creates are topical issues that are ripe for scrutiny as feminism becomes increasingly mainstream and deradicalized. As a corollary to this, hypermasculinity does not allow any form of weakness. Trump’s “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything” reverberates from the US to Modi in India. Power issues inevitably lead to conflicts or exploitation, and what about sexual impotence and slippers? Nicola Genovese would like to come to a deeper understanding of the fragility and ambivalence of the contemporary male, who is – fortunately – facing the slow decline of patriarchy.


Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung From Abdizuel to Zymeloz von Donatella Bernardi. //
This event is part of the exhibition From Abdizuel to Zymeloz by Donatella Bernardi.


Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung.

Thursday, 29 March 2018, 19:00h: After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca
With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Elisabeth Joris and Sally Schonfeldt

Claire Fontaine’s research and practice are profoundly influenced by the non-reformist spirits of Italian feminism in the 70s.
The very concept of a “human strike,” elaborated by the artist, is deeply connected to the analysis of processes of subjectivization and their link with the hidden productive and reproductive labor force that capitalism exploits without remuneration. Carla Lonzi, in particular, has been the subject of several texts written by the artist, such as “We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy,” in e-flux journal # 47 (2013); “Gallerie da non riempire,” in Il gesto femminista: La rivolta delle donne nel corpo, nel lavoro, nell’arte (Derive Approdi, 2014); “Carla Lonzi o l’arte di forzare il blocco,” in Carla Lonzi: La creatività del femminismo (Il Mulino, 2015).
Claire Fontaine has taken part in two events on the legacy of Italian feminism organized by Helena Reckitt: “Feminist Duration in Art and Curating” at Goldsmiths, 2015, and “Now You Can Go,” held at several venues in London in 2016. In the same year, at La Monnaie de Paris, she organized and coordinated the encounter “Work, Strike and Self-Abolition: Feminist Perspectives on the Art of Creating Freedom” with Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elisabeth Lebovici, Helena Reckitt, Marina Vishmidt, and Giovanna Zapperi. She was involved in the symposia “Speak Body,” on issues of reproduction and feminism, at Leeds University in 2017 and “Histories of Women, Histories of Feminism” at MASP in Sao Paulo in 2018.
In light of recent developments in the feminist movement, Claire Fontaine will explore the issue of emotional exploitation and the possibility of striking within the context of care work. The labor of love will be approached as one that is constantly submerged, an invisible effort undertaken by women to hold society together. This work is the secret core of capitalism, which thrives on its charity and generosity and, by denying its importance, threatens every workforce with the prospect of going unremunerated, perpetuating the lie contained in the supposed equivalence of time to salary and money in general.





Sally Schonfeldt (b. 1983 in Adelaide, Australia) lives and works in Zurich. Her work is predominantly concerned with the aesthetic possibilities offered by the contemporary discourse of artistic research. Using this discursive field of research as a foundation, Schonfeldt is concerned with interacting site-specifically in spatial environments to create informative, contemplative situations, which seek to enact alternative modes of experience within the production and reception of knowledge. The overriding impulse behind her work is the generation of alternative possibilities of interacting with history and the construction of new narratives in juxtaposition to accepted cultural orders.
For the occasion of “After Carla Lonzi and Ketty La Rocca,” Sally Schonfeldt revisits the extensive archive she built up during her work The Ketty La Rocca Research Project (2012), in which she first came across the radical feminist thought of Carla Lonzi. Interweaving the presentation of a short experimental archival film entitled Carla, Ketty + I, made especially for the occasion, with readings from her own diary The Ketty la Rocca Research Diary and Lonzi’s Shut up. Or Rather, Speak: Diary of a Feminist, Schonfeldt offers the audience a minor performative gesture to share her personal discovery of Lonzi through La Rocca.



Elisabeth Joris (b. 1946 in Visp, Switzerland), is a historian, who has conducted extensive research and produced numerous publications on Swiss women, feminism, gender equality, and Zurich in 1968. At Corner College, she will take part in a panel following Claire Fontaine and Sally Schonfeldt’s presentations.



Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Ausstellung From Abdizuel to Zymeloz von Donatella Bernardi. //
This event is part of the exhibition From Abdizuel to Zymeloz by Donatella Bernardi.


Die Ausstellung wird unterstützt von der Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung. //
The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung.