The Sunrise Sings at Tarmak22, curated by Chus Martínez

The Sunrise Sings was the 2020 Summer exhibition at Tarmak22, curated by Chus Martínez, assisted by Albertine Kopp and featuring artists Charlotte Herzig, Kaspar Ludwig & Ambra Viviani, Gil Pellaton, Claudia Comte, and Katrin Niedermeier.

The Future of Life is a film by Kaspar Kamu.

The Sunrise Sings. This sentence has been in my notebooks for years, it is a quote by Rainer M. Rilke. I just noted it down, without specifying where I read it.

I am almost sure it was from a letter he wrote to a friend, from Wallis, where he lived. I do believe it. Indeed the sunrise sings to us and so does nature. There is nothing magical or mystical in life living and yet for centuries artists and art, poets and their rhymes, writers and their words, musicians and their notes tried to convey a sense of sacred-ness in addressing the importance of nature. I understand their efforts.

What else was left to them, but to appeal to the sacred character of nature in order to minimize human’s will to destroy it? What else could awake a sense of fear or respect that will make nature gain some time? The interest in nature has not only grown, but has also shaped artistic language.

If we were in the past, we could even talk about the emergency of a specific aesthetic dimension.

What defines this? Attentiveness.

Artists- like the ones selected for this exhibition- listen to the elements and make them dance in their works. You could sense energy and the winds in their works, but also the force of flowers, the logic of earth, the memory of wood. This attentiveness that I described is a logic that defines the kind of experience one gains through the works.

It is as if the works try to convey through their presence the comprehension of coexistence. In understanding what living together with plenty different forms of intelligence, life organizations, energy absorption, an immense diversity of languages and communication forms. Art and artists remind us that art is situated at the meeting point between the organic and inorganic realms.

Therefore you cannot be surprised that the works of all the artists presented here at Tarmak22 in Gstaad are possessed by delicacy.

They want you to come closer, they want to make you aware that your senses are not that different from the senses of plants, or animals.

But also the rain, the sun, light, the winds, earth, all that conforms the environment resonates in these works and then, resonate in us. In the view of these artists, the sensorial activation of our bodies plays a crucial role in the transformation of our behaviour. And changing our routines and habits will eventually drastically modify our thinking.

This road is a completely different one than the one proposed by norms or rationalistic views on life. Thinking here results, at the end, from an acknowledgment that first takes places in our senses.

We sense nature so that we cannot but think that all our habits and laws should be there to make sure we protect what —at the end— will only protect us, nourish us, preserve us.

That’s why artists working this way avoid any sense of spectacularity, because there is no bigger spectacle as the concession that we are nothing alone.

Read also, Chus Martinez on Monopol Magazin!

Founded in 2019 by Antonia Crespi and Tatiana de Pahlen, Tarmak22 exists to breathe life into the cultural landscape of the Swiss Alps. Located directly on the site of the Gstaad-Saanen airport, the galley takes its name from the runway that it overlooks.