Conversation in the exhibition

This event was organized by TheArtists celebrating the publication of the Cahiers d'Artistes 2023, designed and published by Jungle Books. It was part of a series of eight individual formats – including screenings, performances, talks and readings – with each artist who realized an artist book with the support of Pro Helvetia in 2023: Patricia Bucher, Martin Chramosta, Maria Guta, Thomas Julier, David Knuckey, Rhona Mühlebach, Gabriel Stöckli and Eva Zornio. The programme took place between October and December 2023 at various locations in Switzerland. For those interested, they offered the opportunity to obtain a copy of the small edition Cahiers.

Obstacles for Cows, 257 x 364 mm, 100 pages (published by Jungle Books)

Rhona Mühlebach holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art in 2017. Her work includes video, audio, text and installations. Rhona’s work is informed by her interest in relationships between humans, animals, plants and landscapes. She creates fantasies that expand our incomplete understanding of the world we live in through fiction and narratives. Emotional interpretation takes the place of rational evaluation. Her working method assumes that social and historical narratives are subject to constant and diverse (re)interpretations over time.

Rhona Mühlebach’s Cahier is entitled «Obstacles for Cows» and consists of eight music notebooks combined in one book. The scores presented in the ‘notebooks’ are based from her screenplays. She selected passages from dialogues and arranged them – following a graphic system similar to a notation – over multiple pages. The dialogues were also typographically adapted to the characters’ way of speaking, with notations added by composer William Aikman (Glasgow).

The publication format itself also evokes a music notebook, drawing readers into the eight scores and inviting them to reinterpret these scores.

Although Rhona Mühlebach’s Cahier d’Artiste originates from her films, the publication makes only sporadic visual references to them, through eight images. An essay by Chloë Reid appears throughout the publication on each ‘notebook covers’, tying the whole together. Chloë Reid (Johannesburg) is an artist, author and curator. Her main interests include the everyday life’s sociology and the relationships between reading, writing and artistic practice. She holds a BFA (2011) from the Cape Town School of Fine Art and an MFA (2017) from the Glasgow School of Art.