Zilla Leutenegger at Peter Kilchmann

For a number of years, Swiss artist Zilla Leutenegger has made videos, animations and drawings, almost always depicting herself sleeping, running or sitting still in a corner, evoking moods hovering between playfulness and melancholy. Perhaps best known is her video installation from 2001, The Man in the Moon, in which she played the title role, assuming the pose of a peeing man while gazing at the planets. Leutenegger's work has been interpreted as essentially solipsistic, but as her fourth solo exhibition at Peter Kilchmann demonstrated, things are not so simple.

The show, titled "How can we lose when we're so sincere?", set a newly serious tone. Thematically, but also in its use of media, Leutenegger's work has become more complex and diverse, with subjects ranging from drawing and architecture to language and reading. This could be seen in a video collage called Spell (2003), shown on a small monitor in the first of three rooms in the gallery. Spell consists of three horizontal bands of scenes that run simultaneously. The middle shows a running horse (taken from Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing); above, people on a balcony throw what look like snowflakes into the air. As they fall, the flakes are transformed into white letters. The bottom level shows the letters accumulating, as in the video game Tetris, until they collapse and disappear, leaving only the word "spell." The soundtrack is a recitation of "The Erl-King," an English version of the poem by Johann Wolfgang ven Goethe, read by Leutenegger. The description may make the work sound as if it is overloaded with imagery, but Spell is in fact surprisingly subtle, evoking an air of futility and ominousness. Effectively conveying such ambiguous states is one of Leutenegger's greatest strengths.

Language and reading are also the subjects of a video projection called Lisar then boken min savar tutt, which means "To read the book means to know everything" in a fictitious language Leutenegger invented. The language is, in fact, a mix of several, though it sounds a bit like the Swiss dialect Rumantsch. A video from which color is subtracted, leaving only orangy-ocher tones, is projected onto the wall in a corner. It shows a woman bent over a large book, which she helds on her lap. The words she reads aloud appear in a projection beside her, the sentences moving slowly toward a small hole, where they seem to disappear, escaping, as it were, into the main room of the gallery.

There one could view the third and largest installation of the exhibition. Ming (2003-04) is a film that is rear-projected on a reflective glass pane attached to the broken-off top of an electrical tower, which rests on the floor. The film, a 3-D animated loop, consists of a slow tracking shot of black electrical towers in gray foggy surroundings. Though a bit heavy-handed in its self-referentiality, it creates a quiet and lonely atmosphere.

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