Agnes Meyer-Brandis - Cloud Cores, Moon Geese and Wandering Trees

Event Dates: 
7 September, 2017 - 17:00 - 12 November, 2017 - 16:00

German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis develops a playful poesy at the intersection of science and art.

Cloud Cores, Moon Geese and Wandering Trees” is Switzerland’s first major solo exhibition for German artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis. It is co-produced by the HeK and Migros-Kulturprozent. 

When Meyer-Brandis examines cloud cores in the weightless state of parabolic flight, a complex interplay between science and art unfolds. Tracking down elusive natural phenomena such as the migration of trees, the artist explores the spaces between solid ground and the spheres of the imagination. Her observations and her training of moon geese are just as much poetry as they are research. 

Meyer-Brandis says she is “interested in the investigation of everyday life and its realities through the use of augmented ‘fantastic’ reality applications.” Through her installations and videos, she leads us to unfamiliar terrain and apparent impossibilities that defy the laws of physics and shake up our perception and knowledge. Her artistic confrontation with scientific questions and methods focuses on experiencing possible worlds. Thus analogue and digital media become tools for staging spaces for experience and thought. 

For Meyer-Brandis, it is essential to carry out concrete experiments. There is very little computer simulation in her works; rather, she prefers to employ the rules of physics, or actual physical implementations. This is why the development of research tools and other mechanisms plays such an important role; they, too, have a place in her installations and video documentations. Her experiments stand out for their scientific seriousness and subsequent intensive confrontation. Many specialists take part in the development of her projects: from geophysicists to mineralogists, from biologists to spelunkers. 

This exhibition will include several large installations, videos and sketches, notes and references connected with Meyer-Brandis’ diverse research projects. In order to create an overarching reference parameter for her work, she founded “Forschungsfloss – Institute for Art and Subjective Science,” where her projects are categorized. With her “Cloud Core Scanner” she focuses on the sky, researching the behavior of aerosols in weightlessness. The German Space Agency invited her to carry out several experiments during a parabolic flight. The resulting video will be shown in the exhibition.

With “Moon Goose Experiment” Meyer-Brandis launched a large-scale, complex project that she has been working on since 2008. This work is inspired by Frances Goodwin’s 17th century fantasy tale, “Man in the Moone,” in which Goodwin described an adventurous trip to the moon in a goose-drawn vehicle and managed to convey the effects of weightlessness convincingly. The presentation of the habitat of moon geese and the attempts at lunar flight with geese will be one of the exhibited projects. 

Meyer-Brandis’ current research subjects include the phenomenon of migrating trees. In recent years, the artist has been a regular guest at the SMEAR Forest Research Station in Hyytiälä, Finland. The first results of her tree migration analysis also will be presented in Basel.

Admission is CHF 9.- / 6.-

When: 7 September - 12 November 2017

Opening hours: Wed-Sun 12:00 - 18:00

Where: House of Electronic Arts Basel, Freilager-Platz 9, 4142 Münchenstein / Basel