Batia Suter
Batia Suter writes in images. She collects and hoards them relentlessly and has done so for the last 30 years. All types of images capture her imagination, in particular printed images. She favours random methods of research and her sources are as many and various as the types of publications she dips into: all kinds of photo albums, atlases, scientific journals, catalogues, art books, history books, animal magazines and many more besides... Once the images have been patiently collected and organised, Batia Suter starts her game of montage and assembly. It really is a game, a game of chance arranging and rearranging the pictures until the image organically reveals itself. Printed imagery functions like Duchamp's ready-mades, created from materials that are out of context and not in use, and which now need to be taken up for her subject alone.
Suter's open-eyed and open-ended approach to visual information also speaks from her earlier works, especially the two abundant volumes titled Parallel Encyclopedia (2007 and 2017), which playfully allude to the anachronistic practice of summarizing and compartmentalizing human knowledge into thick, leather-bound omnibuses. The pursuit to 'assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth', as Diderot framed it, is an ancient one, but it has always been structured around the idea that knowledge is power, reflecting the interests of either the church, the state, revolutionaries, etc.
Refreshingly, Batia's 'parallel' version proposes a wholly other, 'soft' and subtle approach to the same practice, by creating seemingly endless sequences of associatively related reproductions, which consequently acquire a kaleidoscopic or psychedelic quality. Whereas encyclopedias serve to quench a curiosity by providing definitive answers, hers somehow manage to rouse and keep intact this curiosity by providing no answers at all: only indeterminacies and speculations.
