In Conversation With
Jan Vorisek

The work of Jan Vorisek develops continuously through exhibitions as snapshots of a potentially endless production process, taking form as site-specific interventions, expansive installations, and experimental assemblages of sculpture, video, sound, text and found objects. Oscillating between affect and spatial conditions, these environments reveal structures of ambiguity and alienation embedded in the textures of everyday life, where people feel more irritated and resentful than liberated.

AH: Hi Jan. Last time I saw you was around 7am at the closing of Club Headshop at Kaschemme, the club night you organise every year with Mathis Altman. I remember we celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2023, although at the time it was running under a different name: House of Mixed Emotions. It’s become such a staple of the June art week in Basel – like if you’re not at Kaschemme on the Wednesday of that week, where the hell are you? What’s the genealogy behind this night? 

JV: By now, our club nights have such a long-branching history, cross-pollinating with all kinds of labels, artist-run spaces, artists and guests. It’s been running for over a decade and is still developing. 

AH: Right, because before moving to Kaschemme, House of Mixed Emotions was taking place in a bar, if I remember correctly? 

JV: H.O.M.E was a regular club night at Longstreet Bar in Zürich between 2011-2018. In 2013 it was hosted during Art Basel at Oslo 10. The next year it was held at Hirscheneck and after that, in 2015, we discovered Club Kaschemme, so we moved there and have stayed there since. The first three editions were in collaboration with ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE and Curbit Festival. Over the years we hosted artists such as Julianan Huxtable, Chuquimamani-Condori, Lorenzo Senni, or Suttoo, just to name a few. This year we Invited the Label Czarnagora to curate the live shows.  Our emphasis was always to begin the evening with concerts, live shows and then transition to DJ sets. Somehow it then became this staple Art Basel Wednesday night, which is almost a pivotal moment of the art week.

AH: Sure, it comes right after the first 2-3 important sales days when all the fairs are just opening. 

JV: Yeah, the main work is done, for better or for worse.

AH: Definitely! It’s the either-drown-your-sorrows-or-celebrate situation! There’s a clear flattening of hierarchies. It doesn’t matter who the hell you are, everyone is on a level playing field of the art world’s who’s who. This brings me to thinking about the collaborative and social aspect of the whole endeavour, which, in my mind, is in quite stark contrast to your artwork, let’s say, or the way you present your work in an institutional setting, which is mostly devoid of human presence. In your exhibitions, the feeling is often of having stumbled upon some abandoned site. 

JV: There’s definitely a dialectics at play between these different modes, the white cube versus the club. They’re on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of collectivities, or intensities. And they inform each other. Sometimes I complete my exhibitions with performances, concerts in friends’ shows or invite them to come and perform in my shows. I’m interested in these temporary social configurations. For me, the white cube is just an inverted club space. One is an embodiment of participation, although both are highly collective spaces, just on different time spans (club night duration vs. exhibition duration).

AH: I’m really into how you deploy the term ‘dramaturgy’. For me, your work is essentially calibrated around two key points – space and time. The titles you give your works plays into this too and the experiential factor that’s inherent to all of this. Given this, do you consider your works as environments? 

JV: Definitely. Things stand in relationship to each other, they’re site-responsive. I always try to reflect spatial dimensions, context, working conditions, and this all feeds back into my work. It’s an adaptive mode. I see my studio time as a place of rehearsal, like a band, where I train and prepare myself to perform in front of an audience, learning a set of techniques and response systems. Experimentation without results, an idea that can linger until the right occasion arises. It involves patience but I can be quite  impulsive too. I appreciate the short-notice projects, where I sometimes like being forced to release a work without the time to overthink it. The same goes for playing music, it’s impossible to anticipate the exact situation and vibe of a club night, so i play every set by ear without preparing a set. 

AH: You recently did a residency at La Becque, which is a very particular environment in itself. I spent a couple of days there in 2024 and I felt like I didn’t want to leave. Ever. I can imagine it being very conducive to having the space and time free from distraction, and to be in this very special place, sitting right on Lake Geneva with a view of the mountains, this idyll. It also makes sense given your work with sound and music, in that its director, Luc Meier, has a particular interest, affinity and sensibility for it too. How was it for you? I remember seeing from your Instagram stories these small metal spikes which you were placing and configuring all across your apartment studio, and the La Becque cat just staring at them in confusion. 

JV: It is almost a Biblical paradise, it fills you with anxiety.

AH: It’s the paradise before paradise lost.

JV: It’s almost cruel in the way that you’re in a fantasy idea of what life could be like for everyone, but it’s temporary and you have to go back to the hellscape of metropolitan cities. I feel inspired by the programme and the people participating in this residency, Luc’s sensibilities and there’s a trust that if all these people are doing this residency, there must be something to it. 

For Open Studio, my proposal was called ‘Smoke on the Water’, a site-specific reference of the Deep Purple song that is based on the fire that happened during the Montreux Jazz Festival close to La Becque. I was interested in Lake Geneva and this pristine paradisiacal landscape, and the contrast between the different myths surrounding Switzerland – hardworking, peasants…

AH: Protestant…

JV: Exactly. Protestant lifestyle, precision, industry, but also La Becque is located next to Nestlé, Switzerland in general as a global financial hub for tax evasion, and shady unscrutinised business relations. In that sense, the lake appears like a hyperreal surface, it’s pure while obscuring all of these other elements. There’s almost a mythical entity that’s very calm on the surface but then you have all these currents underneath and they can suck you in. For Open Studio, I installed anti-trespassing spikes, exclusionary design elements that questioned who has access to such places, also in terms of Switzerland, who is allowed in, but also reflecting on this residency where you come to relax, a distant lifestyle, it invites you to also do nothing, which triggers an anxiety of self-discipline. A question often discussed between artists is: should a studio have a cosy daybed for naps or should it be like a gym devoid of distractions?

AH: I think it’s interesting what you say about access because there’s a dichotomy around this in much of your work. Your practice is very generous but it also deals with dystopia and questions of refusal and collapse. There’s another thing that I was thinking about in relation to your exhibition No Sun (2021), for example, at the Swiss Institute, as well as Edge, Hour, Substance (2023) at Kunst Museum Winterthur, and these questions of energy and artificial light, but also this notion of colour, colour theory and ambiance, in your use of coloured gels to tint the light in the space. It got me thinking about Goethe’s Doctrine of Colour (1810), his inquiry into the psychology of colour and emotion, but brought to us by the master of German philosophical nihilism and tragedy, which I found fitting when thinking about your work. Then there’s Derek Jarman’s Chroma (1993), one of my favourite books, in which he has a chapter dedicated to each colour. For him, yellow carries alchemical properties, insofar as it’s a cousin of gold, and actually for Goethe yellow is light that has been dampened by darkness, which I find a really beautiful idea. What’s your take on colour? 

JV: In No Sun, on the first floor, there was a yellow industrial vinyl and corridors that led into the former bank vault. Ironically, by blacking this bank vault out and installing a self-generating drone piece, I wanted to make this usually claustrophobic little space infinite in perception. It’s simulating the experience of leaving a club, your eyes adjusting to the darkness, and then you walk by these labyrinthine walls that we installed and you enter this golden-filled space again. Your pupils have to readjust to the intensity. I’m interested in this dramaturgy of entering a space, you have a certain experience, then you’re altered and you leave the space, and you have an alternate, second encounter. This is the logic that was also present in Collapse Poem (2020) at Kunsthaus Glarus, as well as at the Swiss Institute and in Winterthur. They are based on dead ends, an expectation vs. disappointment, and then you have to walk all the way back, almost in the logic of a loop that’s continuously evolving. The use of colours goes back to the idea of the monochrome. I did a public art project –

AH: With the non-functioning windmill?

JV: Yes. It’s also just a monochrome orange colour, but there it was a more rational reasoning as the space where it’s situated is part of a school (Gymnasium Wiedikon Filiale Hohlstrasse) and I picked orange in relation to the students as the colour of curiosity and enthusiasm. At the same time, RAL2004 is an industrial orange that has a warning/danger semiotics attached to it. All my propositions flip flop between various ambiguities. People approach the windmill with curiosity and they get hypnotised by the spinning motion, but once you leave the stage of affect you start to think about different questions, maybe uncomfortable feelings start to creep up through the backdoor of a more visceral encounter that takes place at first glance. 

AH: Which brings me to the question of whether your practice is more cerebral or visceral? You mention hypnosis, and there is this circularity or even the spiral as a shape that appears often, whether it’s the expanded maze or labyrinth, which historically and in mythology has been the symbol of the unknown, but it’s also a reference to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs maybe.

JV: Totally. Somehow I end up with this spiral motif that is so ingrained in my work, music, architecture, repetitive and loop-based works, and art history in general. The spiral is also about unresolvedness, I don’t like to close or finish a work, everything stays in constant flux. 

AH: Are you interested in the history of design? 

JV: I’m less interested in  designers’ intentions, and more about design as cultural artefact. Like in space age design, it was about a promise for a better world, and I want to know what these promises led to, and how it’s been looked at from a contemporary perspective. With the windmill, there’s the relationship towards history and temporality, for example: Conservatives hate wind turbines because, according to them, it destroys the landscape, but I believe that with years, it becomes a sign of conservatism because it signifies the idea of Heimat, of homeland once people get used to it. Or you can also see it with Elon Musk and his electric cars. One day it’s a sign of liberal progress to drive a Tesla, and then a few weeks later, after Elon Musk’s political intervention, it completely flips on its head and becomes an expression for conservatism and right-wing politics.

AH: A symbol of evil.

JV: Yeah, I’m interested in how these things shift, how these semiotic signs travel, how they can be reconfigured. 

AH: This makes sense, as your work is never static, movement is always implied whether through semiotics, how symbols, signs and meaning shift over time, or depending on the context and perspective from which they’re observed. I only realised recently that the readymade objects that you work with and sculpt, like in your recent exhibition at Arcadia Missa, are actually industrial molds for columns. Instinctively, I always thought of them as pipes, sites of evacuation and trash. There’s something about these sculptures that is very parasitic and abject, especially with the black pins sticking out and set against the yellowing plastic bodies. I have a very physical reaction of discomfort whenever I see them, even just reproduced as images. In their form and shape, I immediately think of Charlotte Posenske and her modular sculptures, although with her it was to do with radical, democratic ideas about material, production and authorship, which didn’t come to fruition as ultimately she became disillusioned with the social potentiality of art and extracted herself from artmaking. But I think it’s an interesting, parallel analogy. 

JV: I also was drawn from a point of affect to these columns because they are abject, they trigger exactly this sort of strange low-level discomfort. What I like about the concept of minimalist work is that they can become quite grand in their readings  once you start to open them up layer by layer.

AH: They’re anti-monuments in a way.

JV: Columns symbolize history, authority and support. By stripping them from their function, they become empty and detached from any classical architectural quality. I’m interested in this afterlife of cheap decorative elements in the context of taste and speculation. Rather than treating them as found objects, I absorb them into my own evolving modular sculptural language, where forms occur, transform and breakdown across different exhibitions. 

AH: How do you relate to artists like Art and Language, in their process of unveiling invisible infrastructures, labour, economies, and the simplicity of working with what is to hand and perverting the functionality and use-value, for example, with the Air Conditioning show? 

JV: I guess it comes down to configuring existing material. Language is a set of probabilities and trying to break it, or break out of it.

AH: Going back to the black vinyl maze, there’s a choreography that’s part of it, how you’re instigating or controlling the movement of the public in that space, and this latent threat or danger but also the desire to keep moving forward. In its materiality it brings to mind Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), the black lake that becomes a site of repressed desire and which results in death, but which is too strong to be ignored.

JV: Definitely, science fiction is a natural point of departure for me. It’s mythologies, the stories people tell each other and the recurring motifs that can break down anxieties, ethics and reason. Especially with the black maze, it’s part of a reference system that involves the Xenomorph and Giger, it’s a sexualised space. It’s also an ancient symbol for the digestive tract, and the feelings located in the gut (angst & desire). You bring up Jonathan Glazer, that film is a prime example of how affect, sound and space work together and there you also have the scenes with the black shiny Goo as well. Or if you look at Andrei Tarkovky’s Stalker (1979) with its famous lake scene, and you can also make a link to Lake Geneva, this subliminal thing that isn’t what it seems or appears to be. Nature is treated not as a picture but as a psychological and spiritual mirror. 

AH: This also relates to the notion of the sublime, whether the historic version or Mark Fisher’s series of essays in The Weird and the Eerie (2017). Historically, in literature the sublime is contemporaneous to the appearance of the Gothic novel. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were holidaying on Lake Geneva in the Year of No Summer was the beginning of Gothic writing, and contemporaneous to philosophical and political tracts like Edmund Burke’s On the Sublime (1757).

JV: It’s always the attempt to break down complex systems into quintessential form through a medium that is like Kafka’s stories or Frankenstein, an abstract lens to grasp the sheer overwhelming vastness of the world. Looking at Switzerland, it’s the recent idea (that dates back to only 100-200 years) that the mountains are beautiful, popularised through Romanticism. Before it was considered as an undesired and hostile environment. It’s alluring to believe that these stories shape our understanding of reality, and not the other way around. 

AH: Exactly, the sublime is the awe and horror that is experienced by being confronted with the natural elements that threaten to engulf, by their sheer scale, the human form. Just think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc (1816).

JV: One of the main reference points for my wind mill public art sculpture, Freiläufer, was Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, trying to think through these natural forces, especially the invisible nature of wind, it’s an element that you can’t really see but which holds so much uncanny power over the world.

AH: And there’s an inherent beauty because of this scale that can’t be mastered or contained by humans. 

JV: Sublime is Terror. 

Work credits
i give back to the landscape, the vomits of experience, 2023
ABS (Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) ready made objects
Dimension Variable
Lukowa Collection Luzern

Lover and Other Strangers, 2023
Polyurethane, epoxid, plaster, dust
200 x 400 x 35 cm

Devotion Strategy pt.2 (braced version), 2023
PVC Fabric, Blower, Scaffolding, Sound Installation, Window Vinyl, Speakers
800 x 1200 cm
Collection of Kunstmuseum Winterthur

special thanks to Edoardo Marabini