Bardage Kunsthalle Basel

E / „Inside the first room of the exhibition, Sylvain Baumann has set up a blockade with his installation Bardage (2012), made up of several sections of wall cladding erected at staggered intervals. Their crumbling fragility makes us think of ruins and architectural remains. In positioning the wall sections so that visitors have to detour around them, Baumann criticizes architecture’s impact uponthose who inhabit it. Visitors are confronted by a physical barrier and are obliged to adapt to the limitations it imposes and take the path it dictates. Alongside this installation, Baumann is showing three large-format photographic works: Étude de Cadre (La Forêt d’Eucalyptus), Étude de Cadre (Arctique) (2010) and his more recent Étude de Cadre 4 (2012). These three C-prints on aluminium offer views into and through different artificial landscapes, evidently the animal enclosures of a zoo. The frame of the glazed window through which each enclosure has been photographed provides a “natural” frame for the resulting image itself. Baumann once again shows how architecture sets boundaries and how we accept these as normal.“
(Excerpt from the press release, Kunsthalle Basel)