Following an invitation by the City of Zurich Kultur, the artist duo FGA (Nienke Terpsma, Rob Hamelijnck) from Rotterdam began their research in autumn 2017 as part of the planned “Regionale”. During a studio stay in Zurich at the beginning of this year, the project of an artist’s book on the art scene emerged from this. The publication contains numerous conversations and contributions by artists from Zurich and the rest of Switzerland and is published as part of “Kunst: Szene Zürich 2018”.
Nienke Terpsma and Rob Hamelijnck have been artistically active in Switzerland on several occasions. In 2008, as a contribution to the exhibition “Shifting Identities” at the Kunsthaus Zürich, they produced the artistic-conceptual field study “The Swiss Issue”, in which they took a look at the working and production conditions, but also at the themes, motifs and interests of their Swiss artist colleagues and the associated mediation context.
The current project refers to this work in the sense of a long-term artistic-documentary study and questions its results anew against the background of a worldwide, rapid change in artistic production conditions.
Much has changed in the last 10 years, not least because of the more economically oriented international art business. But the financial crisis and regulation of the financial industry have also left their mark. Thanks to new training programs and newly oriented universities, artists are now “professionalized” in a different way than they were a decade ago. With an unbiased view from the outside, FGA question the local art scene and its protagonists and draw a picture that is of interest far beyond Switzerland.