The monographic publication “Instrumenarium” by Bignia Wehrli is designed as an open series of separate publications and focuses on the image-generating instruments and settings that the artist has developed in recent years. A first edition, which is being published on the occasion of Bignia Wehrli’s solo exhibition “Den Horizont in der Hand halten” (Holding the Horizon in Your Hand) at Kunsthalle Winterthur, comprises the work groups “Sonnenzirkel (Töss)” (2016), “Sonnenzirkel (Rhein)” (2017) and “Sternenschrif” (2014).
The multi-part work “Sternenschrift” is based on the agricultural work routes for haymaking in Sternenberg, which Bignia Wehrli’s father, equipped with a GPS, covered in late summer 2012. The artist traced these paths with a “star pen”, an instrument she conceived, which consists of a camera pointing to the sky and a pen pointing to the earth. The paths traced with the light of Jupiter appear in the photographs as constellations in the firmament.
In “Sonnenzirkel (Töss)”, a typewriter case converted into a floating pinhole camera produces the images, which Wehrli exchanges for a large-format wooden box in the subsequent work “Sonnenzirkel (Rhein)”. With the opening facing the sun, the bundled rays of the sun are captured and the floating camera obscura becomes a “sun recorder” which records the movements of its own journey on the respective rivers. The resulting circular images can be read as seismographic recordings that provide information about the weather and the course of the journey.
In order to give the individual works in the publication the necessary space, a corresponding format was developed for each. The realisation of the individual publications concentrates on the respective artistic work and does without contextualising information and explanations. In addition to contributions by Yasmin Afschar and Boyan Manchev and a conversation between Oliver Kielmayer and the artist, the accompanying text booklet contains documentary photographs and descriptions of the illustrated works.