The Zurich artist and photographer Ruth Erdt has realised many exhibitions at message salon since 1996. The current exhibition “Das stets sich selbst an den Füssen klebt” (“That always sticks to its own feet”) was also created in response to an invitation from message salon to present a new work before the Perla-Mode building is demolished. In the rooms on the ground floor and in the basement, Ruth Erdt is showing a multimedia installation that revolves around memory, inner images and the nature of photography.
Ruth Erdt’s preoccupation with the medium of photography is based on her 30 years as a photographer of the generation that directly experienced and addressed the transition from analogue to digital photography and the resulting change in the way we deal with images.
The artist poses the question of the image and how the digital flood of pictures affects our relationship to capturing and categorising images in relation to memory. Have the new technical possibilities and their dissemination already displaced and redefined our ability to perceive the experience in the here and now? What future lies ahead for a society that stores its visual memory and history in cyberspace?
In Ruth Erdt’s photography, which became known to a wider audience in 2011 with the exhibition “The Liars” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, with a fictionalised photo installation about her own family and their environment, the actual perception is not always exactly what is visible. An essential aspect of photography is fiction and manipulation through technology and selection. Ruth Erdt’s photography and selection creates inner images when viewed, evokes feelings and awakens an individual, selective memory.
In her preoccupation with the negative, the process in the laboratory, the care and slowness that analogue photography demands, the artist demonstrates a high-level approach to photographic technology. Ruth Erdt uses the medium to convey a reflective statement on the question of the “true” image and an experience in space and time.
The publication “Die Behauptung”, Ruth Erdt, photo zine, 28 pages, b/w, message salon 2013, is published on the occasion of the exhibition.
The exhibition by Ruth Erdt is generously supported by videocompany, Zofingen.