FUTURA: Ruth Widmer

Economic crises, wars, climatic upheavals shape a present that already offers more than enough material for imagining the future. In her first solo exhibition after a longer pause, Ruth Widmer approaches this collapse with her own interpretation and observation, with questions of action and responsibility. In large format drawings and works in porcelain, the artist designs landscapes that do not yet exist but are already palpable. Architectural fragments of a possible future meet the question of the present condition of the human being, of the direction in which we, individually and as a society, are moving. Hannah Arendt describes in The Human Condition the human being as an acting creature who appears to others in the space of appearance. For her, every birth carries within it the possibility of a radical new beginning, a capacity she calls natality, the idea that something unforeseen enters the world with every human being, and that action can always begin anew. Widmer's architectural fragments can be read as such spaces of appearance, places not yet inhabited but already conceivable, designs for a beginning that is still to come. 

The isolated elements of aggression, echoes of the symbolism of conflict inscribed into these landscapes, show no perpetrators, only traces, signs of an action that no longer sees itself. 

What science fiction writers, from Aldous Huxley through Philip K. Dick to Ursula K. Le Guin, imagined as literary visions of the future was never mere fiction but an instrument of critical foresight, a capacity to extrapolate present tendencies far enough that their consequences become visible. What these authors devised decades ago, surveillance, technological alienation, ecological collapse, is increasingly realising itself before our eyes today. Widmer's drawings stand within this tradition as an independent form of speculative thinking.

What will the human being of the future look like, and by what ethical principles will they be guided? Rosi Braidotti asks, in her posthuman ethics, what becomes of responsibility when technology inserts itself between action and consequence. When artificial intelligence and automated systems widen the distance between the act and the one who commits it, the question of guilt becomes diffuse, responsibility becomes something that can be outsourced, detached from the human subject that once carried it. This detachment, which Braidotti names as a central ethical problem of the present, forms the quiet resonance space for the series of porcelain works and the individual stoneware sculptures, fragile, almost archaeological objects that speak of a future in which the human itself has become a matter of negotiation. These are not images of accusation, but a quiet, precise observation, carried by the hope that another, better future remains conceivable.

Ruth Widmer was born in Lugano and trained at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, holding an MA in Expressive Art Therapies. Awarded the Swiss Art Award, she has shown her work at, among others, Galerie Tony Wüthrich Basel, Kloster Schönthal, Ausstellungsraum M54 Basel, and Galerie Mainetti Lausanne.She lives and works in Switzerland.

Curated by: Wiktoria Tundys
Location: Artstübli – Kunst & Kultur, Steinentorberg 28, 4051 Basel

Opening hours:
Wednesady - Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm
Finissage: Thursday, 29 October, 11 am – 6 pm

The artist will be present on Wednesdays from 11 am–6 pm and Saturdays from 11 am–2 pm.

Graphic: Verena Metz

Photo: Wiktoria Tundys