For the duration of the summer exhibition break, StudioK3 in Zürich has made its exhibition space available to Zürich-based artist Ana Strika for the realization of an in situ exhibition project. Ana Strika created an immersive assemblage environment. It consists of things and materials Ana Strika has been collecting over the years. Ana Strika was born in 1981, she lives and works in Zürich. The exhibition runs until August 22, 2020.

Ana Strika: Salle de répétition / StudioK3, Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), August 6, 2020.

–– Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.

Exhibition text by Sandi Paucic:

For the duration of the summer exhibition break, StudioK3 has made its exhibition space available to Zurich-based artist Ana Strika for the realization of an in situ exhibition project. As chance would have it, while Ana Strika was using StudioK3 for several weeks as an experimental space, she had to give up her previous studio and has not yet found a new one. The transition from the past to the future not only applies to the current situation of the artist without a studio but is also significant for her work. She has now also used the phase of transition to rearrange her art storage – she speaks of her props – and to create an environment from the exhibition space of StudioK3.
Ana Strika reacts directly to the presence and charisma of the exhibition space: the place is no longer what it once was. The aging laundry room shows traces of its former function. The old industrial clock on the wall is still running, but the room, with its partly fallen ceiling panels, looks ruinous or like a construction site. The artist has covered the windows with lime paper, the paper veils the urban panorama and creates a mood of weakened, warm light. The back wall with the clock, originally yellowed and scratched, has been covered with fresh white paint, which further alienates the old room with its strangely green columns.
Over the years, Ana Strika has been collecting things and materials which in themselves have no particular material value. Some of them are originally rubbish, others she has received, found and reconfigured. Plastic quality and allusion to content do appear in the assemblage of objects, but do not solidify into sculptural commitment or a comprehensible narrative. Driven by the ‘triggers’ that the room offers her, the artist lays out the props from her collection of cardboard objects, tied up packages, wood and all kinds of oddities in the room or creates “spatial drawings” from sticks, strings, branches and the like. She constantly arranges and changes the museum’s seemingly opulent storage in new contexts and constellations. The work progresses by Strika translating her conceptual associations and ideas into material arrangements. To get ahead, she draws on paper in between and then transfers the drawings into the three-dimensional space with the help of her props. She then photographs the result, only to question it again with new arrangements and experiments with materials – Strika does not strive for a final fixed state and the processual work is at no point ‘finished’. The order of interpretation gradually expands into an encyclopedic world of absurd and surreal neighborhoods and juxtapositions – a hodgepodge of seemingly archetypal things and an enigmatic system of signs that does not strive for lasting meaning or general validity.
Ana Strika, *1981 lives and works in Zurich.