Solo show: Guillaume Pilet - Surrogate Mothers (over)

	Guillaume Pilet

Rotwand - Sabina Kohler & Bettina Meier-Bickel Rotwand - Sabina Kohler & Bettina Meier-Bickel Lutherstrasse 34 8004 Zurich Switzerland (city map) Send E-mail tel +41 (0) 44 - 240 30 55 www.rotwandgallery.com

"Surrogate Mothers is a concept I borrowed from a series of experiments that the behavioural scientist Harry Harlow carried out with baby monkeys. Through these experiments he demonstrated the importance of love - something previously ignored by science - for learning processes and the development of cognitive thinking. This is also a central theme in Learning From Aping, which is the name of my own research into apes which I started a year ago.

Learning from Aping certainly seems to occupy a special place in my work as a whole, you could compare it with what Deleuze describes as the advantage of being a stranger within one's own language. But this series of works is not fundamentally different from the rest of my practice, even if I have to admit that in this case I am granting myself greater freedoms because my sphere of activity, one could call it a pretext, lends itself so wonderfully to experimentation. The project consists of extensive documentation - I am compiling a library specialised in monkeys, and collecting articles and objects from everyday culture - and also a very free interpretation of all these phenomena from a point of view that sometimes verges on the pseudoscientific or even pseudoartistic. The fact that I see myself in Magritte's cow period as much as in amateur art is something I put down to my impartiality towards all forms of artistic expression. Learning From Aping offers wonderful possibilities for play, even my own artistic autonomy/authorship is thrown into question. Sometimes I feel like a character that I have invented myself." (Guillaume Pilet)

Excerpt from an interview by Tiphanie Blanc & Yann Chateigné with Guillaume Pilet

Opening: Wednesday, March 20, 6-8 pm