: : Katja Loher's Video World : :

High art suspended over Concert Hall
Alison Anderson, Perthshire Advertiser, May 16 2008

An enormous white weather balloon is to be the latest feature at Threshold – Scotland’s only art space dedicated to commissioning and collecting digital media art – at Perth Concert Hall.
Measuring 2.5 metres in diameter, the balloon will create another opportunity to display contemporary art at Threshold alongside its existing 30 screens and audio areas.
“The weather balloon will be suspended in the Threshold Stage area,” explained Horsecross’s creative director, Illiyana Nedkova.
“It will be used as a spherical projection screen to display the work of performance and video artist Katja Loher.”
The Swiss artist based in New York has made a critically acclaimed career by incorporating weather balloons in her video installations. She has been creating innovative short films to be projected on this floating surface.
A programme of three new films by Katja has been commissioned exclusively for Threshold artspace where Garden of Eden emerges from seed, philosophical questions are posed by moving crowds with a kaleidoscope of images.
From May 21 to August 31 this feature will play its part in Threshold’s new major show, Primary Ingredients, which will explore how text, letters and lyrics forms the foundations of an artist’s palette.
Nedkova added: “I was fascinated to see how Katja animates some of the 74 poems and 316 playful questions about life, death, nature and rebirth which Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) wrote in the last year of his life.”

Extract from a interview in the catalog Kunstalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland
May 2007
Helen Hirsch, historian and curator, artistic director of Kunsthalle Palazzo Liestal, Switzerland

"Katja Loher (born 1979) stages a human game of chess with live figures. In doing so, she pulls the strings, like with marionettes, and thus challenges the participative role of humans. The strategic game of chess transforms into a battle between life and death and suggests an "end game" in the tradition of Beckett."

Extract from a interview in the catalog Kunstalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland, May 2007
Peter Stohler is an art historian and curator, Director of Centre pour l' image contemporaine, Geneva

The performance and video artist Katja Loher (New York and Basel) talks about her newest work, Schachfeld (The Chessfield), 2007 which she exhibits for the first time as high-definition video projection in the Kunsthalle Palazzo. The 20-minute film, staged in New York with almost50 actors, shows two stylised groups of robot-like pieces on a chessboard. After a while, the actors become autonomous and provide an unexpected twist to the otherwise strongly regularised game.

Peter Stohler: You work like the director of "big" feature films. You shot The Chessfield with three cameras at a time and engaged professionals for a highly artificial sound track. The Chessfield is visually very exciting and perfectly stylised. Some parts remind usof the eccentric world of Matthew Barney. Has it anything to do with the fact that you mainly work in New York since 2004?
Katja Loher: It certainly has to do with the extreme potential of this city. Many are there ready to launch into something at once; this city motivates unbridled thinking. The idea to work with a large group of people came to me last year during my stay in New York. For Video Optica I had directed a large number of people arranged to form alphabets.
Peter Stohler: Your earlier video works have a very “atmospheric” effect: they evoke a very personal, playful world. On the contrary The Chessfield is more political and revolves around very grave matters like the uprising against established power structures: the chessboard becomes the battlefield. Are you now staging “world theatre”?
Katja Loher: Especially today, I consider it very important again to formulate concise statements, as we bear great responsibility as committed artists. I ask myself how we can make political statements with art and keep on trying time and time again. In The Chessfield, the globe is compared with the strategic war game of chess and multilayered, political challenges are provided in the narration.

Katja Loher: The world as a game
In her adopted home New York, the young Swiss shoots big art cinema about the dialectics of freedom
The chessboard and the battlefield are phonetical neighbours in German: „Schachfeld“ and „Schlachtfeld“. This is expressive for Katja Lohers video work, which the 27-year old just recently put into reality with around 50 actors/actresses. In a setting that reminds of the reduced scenery of Lars von Trier's didactic play cinema („Dogville“, “Manderley“), and is being populated by figures that could have escaped from a video by Matthew Barney; Loher reproduces the relations of power and powerlessness (german: „Macht“ and „Ohnmacht“) in the globalised world as a clear interrelation between the top and the bottom. The strict logic of leadership and oppression leads to failure after a while; the hegemony of the kings starts faltering, the pawns strike and take over the lead. But they also fail it: because they never had the opportunity to develop a sense for responsibility, which the kings, on their part, overcame with logic a long time ago. What stays is the vacuum – a threatening state for all the participants. „Chessfield“ – currently to view at the Palazzo Liestal- is the most current work of the Basel and New York based media artist, who delivers precise, aswell as poetic metaphors on the ambivalent relation of power, freedom and dependencies in her extensively produced videos she has been doing for a few years.

“A performance video was projected on a massive globe, to a mix of sung material and field recordings; the images featured a bird person hybrid amid flocks of pigeons, and the video, mapped as it was on a sphere, gave new meaning to the phrase bird’s eye view.”

“Katja Loher creates a poetic metaphor about power, dependence and freedom, which takes place on New York’s rooftops in front of a breath taking evening sky.”

Riehener Zeitung
August 25, 2006
Urs Grether
...Very succeeded was Katja Loher’s peephole at the entrance that projects the gestures and faces of the entering people on a round ball inside. It is the result of a spreading paranoia that the artist experienced in New York.

Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, August 1, 2006
Ann-Katrin Harfensteller
THE SPECIAL LOOK THROUGH A PEEPHOLE

...If a viewer realizes through this work, how constricting and, at the same time, cutout one’s own view can be, the artist Katja Loher confronts the visitor in an even more direct way. A peephole at the entrance of the exhibition seems inviting to look through, in order to see what happens. But there is nothing to see. If the visitor enters the other rooms, he sees a big ball attached at the ceiling, which, like an eye, shows a big distorted image of the person, who is just looking through the peephole. And there is a new movement, this time of the visitor itself as he goes back into the first room and performs a circular motion that way. The moment, he tried to watch an intimate situation, he himself is being revealed. It is a strange, scary reversion that broaches the issue of current reality’s control mechanisms, as the artist says.

Video Optica is a video composition that is projected onto a gigantic floating balloon inside the green room. Born and bred in the shelter of the studio space this botanical beauty blossomed under New York’s skies before it was transported across the ocean to Europe via DVD. Beamed onto polyethylene skin at Wenkenhof, it now floats here in the middle of the room amidst copious opulence, video sculpture and aerial body at the same time. Ripe fruit falls from breezy heights down to the ground. When smashing onto the grey New York asphalt it transforms into red-capped people, their uniformity morphing them into groups. Filmed from the 6th floor they look like birds in flight, like amoebas under a microscope, like a kaleidoscopic shape.
Individual letters evolve from these patterns formed by human masses. The letters turn into words that make up questions from Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions/Libro de las preguntas. These elementary questions about life, such as the human intrusion into the natural cycle, or questions about the human consciousness, questions about knowledge and science, have a lyrical impact. The floating weightless air-sculpture also enchants us with its lightness, its playfulness, its romantic poetry brought on by the spherical bubble shape, and the way it evokes childhood memories. Its proximity to popular culture, the funfair, to modern shapes of the spectacular makes the Video Optica, as balloon, a symbol for the ephemeral and the volatile. Oscillating between aesthetic effect and meaningful content the Video Optica is a “blow-up“ representing many metaphors: the metaphor of fast paced accelerated growth, the metaphor of nature “in the age of mechanical reproduction“ (following Walter Benjamin) and the “loss of aura“ that is connected to it, which was supposed to revitalize art in the 90s. The giant balloon is a blow-up, it is art as simulacrum, imitating that which can be manipulated – and it is a “mass ornament“ (Siegfried Kracauer).

AZ Schaffhausen
(Weekly Newspaper of the town)
November 23. 2006
Peter Pfister
HONEY SUCKING HELICOPTERS AND AIRY DREAMS
Walter Pfeiffer and Katja Loher are performing, two artists from Schaffhausen that made a name for themselves abroad.

PLANETS IN SPACE
...Katja Loher created a completely different dream world. Born in 1979 in Schaffhausen, she studied media arts in Geneva and Basel, currently works in New York and is expecting to exhibit in Poland and China. In the dark south room, video loops are being projected on to four hovering weather balloons. Seemingly from the dark space, the visitor is looking at the planets and the strange things happening on them. While one planet, there seems to be a war, happening through a martial chess game performed by people as figures, the inhabitants of another one change to the windswept world above them, between them the underwater world with it’s perfidies. Being viewed from the bird’s eye view, the inhabitants of the third one shape letters, which form sentences from Pablo Neruda’s „Book of Questions“, posthumously published in 1974. For example, one can read: „Why don’t they train helicopters to suck honey from the sunlight?” On the fourth planet, one becomes the object of observation after all. It is because there is a camera installed into a peephole built into the wall, which projects approaching objects, like a huge nose to the balloon, visible to everybody else but the one peeping. That way, the direction of the view is suddenly about-facing, and the plants, we suspect, may just as well be huge eyeballs, which are watching us, just like we watch them.

Schaffhauser Nachrichten
(Daily Newspaper of the Town)
November 22. 2006
Alfred Wüger
BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE ORANGES
Two artists with Schaffhauser roots, Walter Pfeiffer and Katja Loher, experienced a very well visited art opening last Saturday at “Forum Vebikus“

In the south room, the 1979 born video artist Katja Loher created a walkable universe with the title “A view to the planets 2006: heavenly observations“ („Eine Sicht auf die Planeten 2006: himmlische Beobachtungen“). Videos are being projected to weather balloons that are hung at breast height. One can see every day scenes or collaged footage of people, filmed from far above, that form funny statements like „Between the sun and the oranges“. They are planets with a poetic atmosphere that make one curious and, at the same time, put one into the middle of the action. Depending on the angle of one’s view, the motion pictures look like the shimmering iris of an eyeball – this game between the observer and the observed person is being carried to the extreme with a camera that is installed into the wall, just like a peephole: the person who looks clandestinely through the peephole is being exposed to the others. Katja Loher already passed the ordeal in the cauldron of New York’s scene.

Katja Loher, Sylvie Rodriquez: Love.com
The State Hermitage Museum
Two projects, two loves. The first, Floating Rendezvous by video artist Katja Loher. On three balloons, there is a projection of videos with similar narratives. What are they about? Probably about love and, may be, about loneliness. Eerie scenes, blurry contours, hushed sounds. A bar table, an ashtray, wine glasses, a feeling that they are almost about to fall. We look into it. It turns out that the bar is under water. The first visitor swims in. Sits down, waits for someone, tries to smoke. Appears She. A mute, bubbling conversation starts, deprived of liveliness and movement. It’s funny and a little bit frightening. It seems as if you suddenly viewed someone’s dream in which everything is ephemeral and undecided. The elements don’t fall into one place; the lovers who arrived for a rendezvous do not understand and do not see each other. Perhaps, Floating Rendezvous is a memory of a long departed, almost forgotten feeling or, the other way around, a vague premonition of love, which appears somewhere deep inside and does not yet have defined outlines. Perhaps this is also a project about the impossibility of discovering oneself, of “letting the skeleton out of the closet” as the Europeans say. It is difficult to say. Love, according to Loher, is a thing in itself.

St.Petersburg Times
(Main Newspaper St. Petersburg)
December 23. 2005
Andrei Vorobei

Swiss video installations on show at the Hermitage Museum
All you need is love
The National Center for Contemporary Art has brought a little love from Alpine Switzerland to wintry St. Petersburg with a video installation project called Love.com. The Russian organizer of the event, Maria Korosteleva, said that Love.com is probably the first attempt to show Swiss contemporary video art in St. Petersburg.
Swiss artists Katja Loher and Sylvie Rodriguez, taking part in the the project at the State Hermitage Museum’s educational center, display two multimedia installations presenting contrary experiences of love. Although Loher’s piece is based on a fairly commonplace sense of what love is – something that happens between two people – it is quite extravagantly realized. In Floating Rendezvous Loher presents three videos projected on three large suspended balloons. The video part of the work, featuring a couple trying to live underwater, intensifies the balloon metaphor of love as something “suspended” and in which it is difficult to stay balanced and rational.
As well as presenting their own works, Loher and Rodriguez have prepared a video art program by other artists. It consists of 10 love-themed pieces produced during the last five years by Swiss artists of different generations.

Commission’s Report
TPC CreaTVty Award 2004
TV Production Center, Zürich, Switzeland

Katja Loher, graduate of the academy for design and art Basel, shows the boundaries between reality and imagination with her video projection Irgendwo sein/Where ever you may be in the category media art/media design. With the presentation of the weightless journey through space and time, she skillfully blends image and sound elements.
The jury especially acknowledges the young artist’s decision to use an emotional and subjective pictorial language.

Die Vorstadt
Newspaper of Zürich, Switzerland, November 17. 2004
Simon Eppenberger

The TV Production Center TPC gave away the creaTVty Award
The tpc creaTVty awards took place for the third time November 10th. The awards for film and media art went to Katja Loher and Thomas Gerber.
The two young artists received their price, with each being endowed with 10’000 Francs, in front of 600 guests from economy, politics, art and celebrities. 50 diploma works were handed in from the students of the Swiss academies for design and art (HGK) and the jury awarded Katja Loher’s contribution in the category media art/media design and Thomas Gerber’s work in the category film/video with the first place.
In Katja Loher’s video projection, the graduate of the HGK Basel skillfully processes the „weightless journey between space and time, between dream and reality“, as the jury called it.
(...)Besides the awards, the winners also receive the attention of the Swiss art- and advertising scene. In the following year, the advertisers and artists will attend the awards for the 4th time in the Studio 1 of the tpc. Again, making contacts among each other and the upcoming talents will be a part of the program.