The book “This Never Happened” is published as the conclusion of the exhibition series “transitions”, which Josiane Imhasly has realized in 2017/2018 as part of the *KURATOR support program of the Gebert Stiftung für Kultur in der Alten Fabrik. “This Never Happened” is a cinematic-reflexive tour through an envisioned exhibition, which is fed by the four realized projects, but has been expanded beyond that - and never took place in this way.
In her exhibition series, Josiane Imhasly took up four themes that reveal social upheavals and states of emergency. The first exhibition “Gut gespielt. Der Mensch und sein Avatar” (Well Played. Man and his Avatar) focused on the game in the digital age. The second exhibition explored strategies of camouflage, deception and imitation visible on the body and the environment. The third project “Was in der Luft liegt” (What’s in the air) was about rumours. Because they are diffuse and difficult to grasp, they were explored with actions and performances that also took place in public space. Last but not least, Denise Bertschi and Inas Halabi showed research-based works in “Forever or in a Hundred Years” that deal with the creation of myths, the overlooked and the repressed.
Reality and its boundaries to fiction, fantasy, virtuality and imagination; to the hidden, secret, invisible; to the repressed, forgotten – these were issues that repeatedly arose during the exhibition series. This gave rise to the idea of imitating an exhibition for the publication, or rather creating conditions, objects and ideas, or even smuggling them into the book, which were not present in the Alte Fabrik during these weeks and months. This procedure also refers to the fact that an exhibition has a large random and arbitrary part to play. The publication suggests how it could be (or have been) possible otherwise.
Installation views have long since become an indispensable medium for communicating exhibitions - even more than the exhibitions themselves, one sees pictures of them. The title of the book refers to this indirectly: Peter Baracchi was not only responsible for the exhibition views in the series, but also contributed to “Tarnen, täuschen, imitieren” (Camouflage, deceive, imitate) a work entitled This Never Happened. And his pictures are now the basis for this publication, which, however, plays with them: On the one hand, the photographs are reassembled to create a new space, even a fantastic multi-story exhibition building. On the other hand, the reassembly of the existing refers to a site-specific intervention, a spatial illusion that Nils Nova realized in the context of “Tarnen, täuschen, imitieren”. On the other hand, the rooms are also filled with works of art that were never in Rapperswil. Olaf Knellessen's text interweaves the four exhibitions under the motto “transitions” on the level of content; in addition, he unexpectedly provided a few hooks for the picture section.