Ingrid Wildi

Ingrid Wildi lives in Geneva.

She studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich and took postgraduate studies at the Ecole supérieure d’art visuel in Geneva (with Silvie Defraoui, Ursula Biemann and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster).

Besides numerous solo exhibitions, e.g. “De Palabra en Palabra” at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (both 2004) and “Quelquepart II” at the Kunsthaus Glarus (2006), Ingrid Wildi’s work was presented at the exhibition “Shadows collide with people“ in the Swiss Pavilion of the 51. Biennale di Venezia in 2005.

Group exhibitions include “re_view / Collection (Migros Museum, Zurich, 2003); “Reprocessing Reality“ (P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center – MoMA, Long Island City, NY, 2006); “Efecto Downey” (Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, 2006); “Soleil Noir” (Kunstverein Salzburg, 2006); “mankind. Story of a Wound“ (SMAK, Gent, 2006); “Une Question de Génération” (Musée d’art contemporain, Lyon, 2007) and “The Screen Eye or the New Image” (Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Luxemburg, 2007).

Her video essays, which range between documentary and art-house film, are mostly based on conversations, where she poses questions on the topics of philosophy, religion, politics, connecting the answers of the participants with statements on their own history.

The spoken word and the voice as a medium of a performative speech flow are of particular interest to her. The speech is used as documentary material. She combines specific fragments of the conversation in a non-linear way to fictionalize it and thereby visualize the invisible.

For Ingrid Wildi the interview is an instrument to think about personal life stories as well as the world history, along the way people understand their own history in relation to collective history. It is a place where memory, projection and fiction are mixed.