For the artists, media translation processes are essential means of their work. Both are interested in the interrelations between creatively intended procedures and (sometimes only limited controllable) influences of reproduction technology or machinery. From this point on, however, two very different works develop, which the joint show sets in relation to each other.


Kyra Tabea Balderer (born 1984, lives and works in Zurich) creates photographs that address the question of the extent to which our perceptions and perspectives are historically and culturally determined and how man-made structures and artificial categories shape our living conditions and our relationship to the world around us. In her works she combines sculpture, painting and photography. She uses mirrors and filter foils, the use of light and shadow and, last but not least, a skilful handling of focus and depth of field to precisely stage the objects and structures built in her studio, which she then photographs with an analog large-format camera. The formal language mixes archaic-looking fragments with more futuristic or contemporary-looking artifacts from the recent industrial past. The subjects speak of figurativeness and abstraction, physicality and dissolution. Alongside the subject is the question of the imagery of photography and what residues, displacements, and symbolic qualities can arise in the process of photographic transfer.

Ellen Möckel (born 1984, lives and works in Berlin) explores questions of transformation at the interface between analog and digital reproduction in the field of drawing and printmaking. Her artistic work is created almost exclusively with laser engraving machines, which are available to her as an extended hand. She is particularly attracted to exploring the boundaries of manually drawn work using machine-based printmaking. In the medial translation from the digital to the analog, the artist mainly uses natural materials such as cork, wood and paper. At the core of her exploration of machines is the repurposing of technology that has been used primarily for industrial purposes. On the one hand, Ellen Möckel is concerned with the artistic appropriation of the machine, which is designed for craft, and its processes. On the other hand, however, her main goal is to make visually visible and tangible the joy of the possibility of a self-determined transformation controlled by the machine itself.