Press

PRESS 2006

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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