© Maya Rochat

Lausanne-based artist Maya Rochat, winner of the Prix Mobilière 2019, will be closing her solo exhibition at the Mobiliar headquarters in Bern with a live performance. Rochat is inviting four befriended artists to the finissage on the 20th of August, beginning at 6 pm for the conclusion of her colourful exhibition.

On the 20th of August, the exhibition Living In a Painting – The Heat Is On will end with five live performances. Maya Rochat will give her works a new look using eight overhead projectors, accompanied by four other artists, who will interact with the works.

SARAH BURGER will present the piece Monster, Lines (2019) – a group of tubular sculptures consisting of steel structures covered with digital prints, representing greatly enlarged instances of material damage to old photographic negatives.

U5 will invite the audience to use a “palm camera” to take pictures themselves, to interact with the exhibition, and to address issues pertaining to contemporary photography, documentation of everyday life, surveillance and self-portrayal.

VIVIANE MOREY will take ecofeminist theories as a basis to present an inspiring speech on the following topics:

Future, ecological disasters, social injustices and discrimination.

CHARLOTTE NAGEL, artist and performer, will sing simple songs in French, backed by electronic drums and synth loops. by so doing, she will be combining mystic pop with poetic statements.

© Maya Rochat

Art and future | Maya Rochat Takes Courageous Approaches

Maya Rochat (b.1985) works in a radically associative way with fragments of images, be they her own or external. The source material for her works consists of photographs, which she distorts, paints over, damages, reconstructs and coats, thus leading them over the threshold to painting.

In her artwork, she takes the respective exhibition venue as a starting point and creates spectacular room installations, as demonstrated impressively in her exhibition at Mobiliar. Rochat operates in different worlds and has no reservations about applied art. She believes that art should not only take place in museums and galleries, but also in people’s everyday lives. With her own clothing label, she makes her works affordable and wearable for everyone. This is because, in her opinion, art does not depend on form – the intention behind it is important. “A baseball cap with one of my motifs can make just as strong a statement as a painting on the wall,” says Rochat, making her position clear.

For Maya Rochat, art is a reflection of current issues and challenges, with which she wants to make her audience think. It is her view that, as an artist and as a human being, she cannot close her eyes to the world’s problems. Her works confront the audience with socially relevant issues and prompt contemplation about how we wish to shape our future. The excessive use of plastic in the world is just one of the topics that she reflects on in her artwork. Thus, engagement with art can provide a fascinating path towards openly addressing key issues of the future.

Maya Rochat’s works has already been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, at Kunsthaus Langenthal, and at Tate Modern in London. During the Locarno Film Festival, in which Mobiliar has been involved as a main partner since 2017, she has enriched Locarno Garden la Mobiliare at Castello Visconteo with enchanting projections of images and videos. In addition, one of her installations can still be seen in the Mobiliar managerial building in Nyon until the 31st of January 2020.

For more Information about Maya Rochat visit:

www.mayarochat.com

Mobiliar’s corporate social responsibility

With its corporate social responsibility, Mobiliar, a cooperative company since 1826, pursues a vision: commitment to Switzerland. Mobiliar supports research projects at institutions such as the University of Bern, ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne. It enables and initiates new projects pertaining to culture and sustainability all throughout Switzerland, has made a new commitment to youths with its Atelier du Futur, and has launched the Switzerland-wide bee project MoBees. Mobiliar funds preventative projects for protection against natural hazards in various regions of the country and has also set up a successful platform to bolster small and medium-sized businesses’ capacity for innovation.

More information on Mobiliar’s commitment can be found at mobiliar.ch/engagement.

Castello Visconteo, location of the Locarno Garden la Mobiliare during the Locarno Film Festival, illuminated by Maya Rochat; © Michael Calabrò