Kunsthalle Ausserbinn

Exhibition information:

With the opening project, things have come full circle: the internationally renowned artist Thomas Julier has family roots in Ausserbinn. In his exhibition Body Copy, he explores the inherent tension between human authorship and artificial intelligence. The project is based on his archive of around 4,600 T-shirt slogans, which he has been collecting since 2016.

Using language models to analyse emotions, Julier filtered the material according to the categories anger, sadness and love. The AI model evaluates the slogans and condenses them into a complex image, which Julier transforms into a photo negative and exhibits in the Kunsthalle as a large photographic print – a visual “long exposure of the crowd,” in Julier’s own words.

The second work is a sound piece in which a human voice reads selected slogans from the artist’s archive.

In the former dairy building, the mechanical perspective and the embodied presence of speech come into direct contact. Body Copy is a perceptive reflection on our times, revealing how public language now circulates as a data trail between bodies, media and algorithms.

Thomas Julier lives and works in Zurich and Mühlebach/Ernen. He exhibits internationally and is represented in important public and private collections, including the Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthaus Aarau, the Mobiliar art collection, the Fotomuseum Winterthur collection, the Swiss Post art collection and the Julius Bär art collection.