While staying in the guest studio of the Sitterwerk in summer 2011, the American artist Shana Lutker prepared for her exhibition A. G. L. & X. at the Galerie Barbara Seiler, which opened in Zurich in June 2011. In her artistic work in the Sitterwerk, she conducted an in-depth exploration of the history of the development of psychoanalysis and Surrealism. She also did research on the Salpétrière Hospital in Paris, where the first professorship in the world for illnesses of the nervous system was created especially for the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in 1872. The most famous of his students was probably Sigmund Freud, and André Breton and Louis Aragon described the «hysteria» invented by Charcot as a great poetic discovery.
For her exhibition at the Galerie Barbara Seiler, Shana Lutker reproduced objects that she discovered in the Salpétrière Hospital in various techniques and combined these replicas with things that she distanced from their original meaning or function and arranged on different levels like words into complete sentences. Nonetheless, the objects remain entirely what they are—without function or meaning—so that the sentences formulated with them are also continually able to evade any interpretation in an almost mysterious manner.
Galerie Barbara Seiler
Shana Lutker: Notes for A. G. L. & X.
June 4 – July 16, 2011