At Art Rotterdam 2019 we present five recent projects by Laurence Aëgerter (FR, 1972).
Her extensive oeuvre comprises photographic series, artist’s books, multiples, site-specific installations, textile works, and community projects. Aëgerter makes inventive use of archives and existing images from illustrated books to museum collections, in a transcultural and transhistorical practice reflecting on the meaning of the image in relation to identity and collective memory.
In recent years Aëgerter shifted her focus to the fragile edges of the human mind and playfully appropriated images in collaborative projects involving, among others, patients dealing with mental health issues, neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Three recent projects—Color Field Phaedra (2018), which was never shown before, Photographic Treatment © (2017-2018), and Compositions catalytiques (2017)—deal with the potential of people struggling with illnesses such as dementia or psychosis and appeal to the use of these people’s imagination, their power of association and free interpretation. The resulting art works both result from collaborations with patients and their attendants and are reflective of the healing power of photography and other visual art forms. The two other projects Soul Imprint (2010) and Healing Plants for Hurt Landscapes (2015) deal with self-therapy (through automatic writing) and a form of herbal image therapy for the healing of landscapes destroyed through natural or man-made disaster.