Films

From the very beginning, the work of Roman Signer (*1938, CH) has been concerned with ephemeral events and the release of provoked and existing energies. His materials are natural forces such as water, wind, fire or gravity, which he relates to everyday objects such as chairs, buckets, red kayaks, blue barrels, remote-controlled flying objects, umbrellas or fans and which repeatedly appear as leitmotifs in the artist's work. He forms grotesquely comical situations into images and unfolds a subtle poetry of humour. Signer documents the precisely planned actions, which are composed of the potential of the situation, the transformation of energy and the trace of the process, in photographic series, on film or later on video. The Super 8 films that Roman Signer shot from the mid-1970s onwards play a special role. They go far beyond a filmic documentation of his actions and become an independent medium in his oeuvre. At the centre of the exhibition are the films made in Signer's hometown of Appenzell and the surrounding area. This is Roman Signer's first solo exhibition in Appenzell, CH, which extends over three floors of the Kunsthalle and parts of the former brickworks.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a Catalogue raisonné of all the Super 8 films will be published by Verlag Walther König, edited by Peter Zimmermann, with texts by Stefanie Gschwend (Director of the Kunstmuseum / Kunsthalle Appenzell) and Stephan Kunz (Director of the Bündner Kunstmuseum).