Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier at Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen

To the press Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier «Together». Precise observation of the people around them is often the starting point of the artistic collaboration of Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier. The artist duo collects audiovisual attributes which construct the identities of individual people or groups and examine how they behave in relation to the self-perception of a social collective. Using this method, they create an impressive picture of contemporary life.

At Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, their first comprehensive solo exhibition, Scagliola & Meier are showing a selection of photographs from their latest photographic series. Following the strategies of ‘street photography’, over the last years they photographed people from all sorts of milieux, of all ages and various origins unnoticed in public, semi-public, and privatized urban space.

In various cities — including Zurich, Paris, New York, and Beirut — they chose locations where the generally visible social life of a society takes place, where people pursue certain everyday rites and their representative selves and forms of conduct outside of their private sphere can be seen particularly clearly: streets and squares, cafes, railway stations, and shopping centers. The urban centers — designed for architectonic transparency and optimized for commercial use — are so similar that it cannot be seen from the photographs where they were taken.

How this anonymous city-center architecture influences the behavior of passers-by is the focus of Scagliola & Meier’s interest. In the process, the artists’ gaze is always directed towards the people and their attempts to demonstrate their original selves in the face of the mainstream — an aspiration, however, that is doomed to failure because ultimately they move within it.

While with the photographic works Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier succeed in creating a topical appraisal of the generally visible, everyday life of various social classes, their new work "Together" concentrates on a group of youngsters. At the last autumn fair in Basel, they filmed teenagers in slow motion on the ‘Tagada’ carousel, a popular meeting place. The film precisely depicts the insatiable need for validation and self-staging that drives the youngsters and which the artist duo examined intensively in their work "Neue Menschen" (2011).

Extracts from a collection of conversation fragments extend the exhibition on a textual level: Scagliola & Meier bring together snippets heard by chance on the street, friends’ stories, and monologues from YouTube videos into a ‘(main)stream of consciousness’, in which banal everyday experiences are cited just as much as personal confessions.

Parallel to the exhibition, the publication «years later...» consisting of an illustrated book and the text book «hours later...» is being issued by Edition Patrick Frey. There will be a prelaunch at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen on the opening evening.

Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier work together since 2008. The works of the artist duo have been shown at various exhibitions around the world.