Exhibition: Batia Suter (CH/NL)

Batia Suter's installation presented in NŌUA, Octahedral is a captivating exploration of architectural shapes and photographic artistry. The exhibition is the first of the 2024 program at NŌUA, as an official collaboration with the European Capital of Culture Bodø 2024. The program is part of the collaborative project Out of the Metropolis - Art exchange across borders initiated by NŌUA, in partnership with the Finnish Museum of Photography and DoubleDummy.

Suter digitally manipulates images sourced from old books and magazines, presenting them in two expansive montages within the gallery space. The first projection showcases significant architectural structures across history, resonating personally with the artist. Meanwhile, the second projection features an animated sequence of plastic food containers, creating an ongoing, fluid display of evolving forms and shapes. The still images present a continuous slideshow where subjects morph seamlessly, intertwining Suter's photographs taken in Bodø into the exhibition's fabric.

The design of Rintala Eggertsson Architects created for the gallery creates a deliberate contrast with the buildings depicted in the videos, highlighting the evolution of contemporary photographic practices. This deliberate pairing emphasizes architecture's role in narrative storytelling, influencing our intellectual and perceptual understanding, shaping individual experiences, memories, and social interactions.

Initially appearing fragmented and detached from their original contexts, these depictions now form a cohesive, animated arrangement, pulsating with an organic coherence that invigorates the gallery. Suter's amalgamation of elements from disparate times and cultures encourages a profound contemplation of architecture's enduring impact on our perceptions, memories, and collective consciousness. Suter’s exhibition serves as a conduit shaped by human experience, prompting reflection on our surroundings, the significance of the structures we create, inhabit, and engage with, and how these constructs mold our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

The exhibition is curated by Francesca Marcaccio Hitzeman. 

The exhibition is funded by Bodø2024, Creative Europe, Arts Council Norway and BKH Utviklings og Formdlingstilskudd.

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The Swiss-born, Amsterdam-based artist Batia Suter (b. 1967) studied at the art academies of Zürich (CH) and Arnhem (NL), and was also trained at the Werkplaats Typografie. Suter produces monumental installations of digitally manipulated images for specific locations, and works on photo-animations, image sequences and collages, often using found historical pictures. In 2007 and 2016 she published the artist books Parallel Encyclopedia and Parallel Encyclopedia #2, based on compositions of images taken from old books she has collected along the years. Her other books; Surface Series (2011), Radial Grammar (2018), and Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) (2019), are evocative montages of found images exploring the diverse resonances of geological shapes and landscapes, visual surfaces and image structures. The underlying themes of Batia Suter's practice are the 'iconification' and 'immunogenicity' of images, and the circumstances by which they become charged with new associative values. Her work intuitively situates old images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significant possibilities. By this method, and with an attuned sensitivity to hidden harmonies and expressive accidents, Suter thus generates hypnagogic spaces where pictures can communicate by their own logic, in a force field of imaginative metamorphosis.

Francesca Marcaccio Hitzeman is an independent curator, art consultant and writer specializing in photography and contemporary art. She holds degrees in Art History and Fine Art Photography from UAL and she received a bursary for the London Royal College of Arts Curating Programme and she was selected for the Emerging Curators residency at the Otis College in Los Angeles in 2019. She draws on her international perspective to connect artists and audiences across cultural and geographic boundaries, working with a variety of clients including galleries, museums, art fairs, institutions, and private collectors. Francesca has held various roles at esteemed institutions, galleries and festivals including the Whitechapel Gallery, International Center of Photography, Jeeum Gallery and Savignano Photography Festival. She is currently based in Hong Kong.