Gabriela Löffel
Embedded Language 

From November 19, 2015 to January 30, 2016
Opening on November 19 at 7 pm

Gabriela Löffel’s work explores the liminal zones where slippages of meaning take place. She examines the structures that regulate the representation or interpretation of reality, which we might call the space of mediation. Fragmenting, translating and shifting from live to interpretation are strategies she develops to create a dialectical field of questioning, of reasonable doubt. Here, two works are shown: Embedded Language and The Case.

For Embedded Language, Löffel interviewed the manager of a defense industry company during the 20th International Defence Industry Exhibition MSPO in Poland in 2012. Recorded on video, the interview was then translated and dubbed by a professional actor. The transition from the documentary to a production space for fiction, the dubbing studio, enabled her to deconstruct the arms merchant’s discourse and thus to raise numerous questions around the political and economic interests tied up with weapons manufacture and sales.

The Case examines the precise moment when language becomes rhetorical. For three days, Löffel filmed the debates organised by the ELSA International Moot Court Competition in Geneva. For this competition in pleading in international trade law, students argued fictitious cases before a jury. The teams used numerous rhetorical strategies and moved blithely between the role of the accused and that of the defence. These debates inevitably make us think about the connections between language, its judicial use and its influence on state powers.

In this exhibition, Gabriela Löffel’s work is seen alongside that of Léna Mill-Reuillard and Nadia Seboussi. Although each has a singular theme, the three artists examine the methodology of representation and what lies in the interstice between our vision of the world and the image, on the perceptual, socio-political and semantic levels alike. The three projects brought together here offer a gaze on the way we convey the world through images, thereby raising the entire question of the influence, transmission and rewriting of history.

Gabriela Löffel lives and works in Geneva and Bern. She graduated from the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Geneva in 2005. Her work has been shown in numerous institutions and festivals in North America and Europe. She has participated in the Biennale of Moving Images (Geneva, 2003), the 700IS Experimental Film and Video Festival (Iceland, 2007) and more recently the group show Twisting C®ash at Bâtiment d’art contemporain "Le Commun" (Genève, 2015).

This exhibition receives the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.