Going against the surge of digital, Swiss artist duo Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer embrace analogue and the “hand-made” – from dark-room printing to carefully prepared color backdrops and hand-painted frames that they build themselves.

 

The series “Artefakte und Modelle” is a collection of objects that embody the human struggle for knowledge. Over twelve years in the making and numbering hundreds of images, the project inventories the models, artefacts, natural specimens and teaching objects that the two women have unearthed traveling to search through the archives and collections of European universities and natural history museums.

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However, with information and provenance entirely exorcised from their titles, we are left knowing almost nothing factual about each of the photographed items: not the collection they belong to or the place of that archive; nor when they date from, who made or found them or how they came to be collected; nor any explanation as to the ideas, theories and natural laws that each of the models apparently embodies. Instead, they are left to communicate through the power of their visual identity alone.

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Each of the selected objects is treated to the artists’ mobile photo studio where they are sympathetically posed in front of colored paper backdrops (sometimes assembled with other items, but most often standing alone), seductively lit and skilfully shot.

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A book to the series has been published by About Books in 2021.

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Lena Amuat (*1977, CH) & Zoë Meyer (*1975, CH) live and work in Zurich and Berlin. They both graduated from the University of the Arts in Zurich and collaborate since 2008.