Janik Bürgin
I saw a shooting star and thought of you

Exhibition:
September 8 to October 21, 2023

Opening:
Thursday, September 7, 2023, 18.30h
Introduction by Anna Konstantinova, Project Manager Art Vontobel

Artist Talk:
Saturday, September 23, 2023, 15h
Moderated by Olga Osadtschy,
Photo and Media Historian / Assistant Curator Kunstmuseum Basel

Finissage:
Saturday, October 21, 2023, 13-17h

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Friday 17-19h
Saturday 13-17h
or by appointment


I saw a shooting star and thought of you
Chance and fate. These two components of life affect us all and can hardly be controlled. They shape our everyday life, lead to changes, influence the course of things and guide us to the stage of life where we are at the moment.
Such a succession of changes is captured photographically by Janik Bürgin in his extensive series WALKING WITH THE WIND. Landscapes, portraits, tie-re, clouds, detail shots, shadow plays - as diverse as the individual photographs of WALKING WITH THE WIND may seem in their motifs, they are all the more closely linked in content, based on each other and complement each other.Janik Bürgin took the first photographs of the series in 2019. At the beginning, the focus was on places to which he had a connection and with which he related an experience. The initially landscape-oriented themes expanded over time. With the processing of events such as the separation from a girlfriend, the meeting of new people or the making of a decision, Bürgin's view expanded. Situations and compositions, places and relationships that had previously received little photographic attention now became the subject of the photographs. Only through change can a new step be taken and only through a new step can a new perspective be opened. Bürgin allows himself to be driven and guided by these changes. Nevertheless, the photographs are taken actively and are not the results of a mere stroll with the camera. The camera is used consciously, a certain blurriness is used consciously, no technical perfection is striven for consciously, analog and digital photography is used consciously. While for Bürgin the digital camera underscores the speed of the medium, analog photography represents a slowing down of the process. The oscillation of speed is reflected in the photographs. 
It is not so much a question of which photograph was taken with which camera, but rather of the sense of time that the photographs convey to us. The flying cloud constructs seem to be in eternal retirement, while the compact mountain ranges seem more alive with every glance. Thus, even the absence of color has a clear meaning. We never see the world as black and white film renders it. It is a non-existential world that is nevertheless our reality and consequently has voids that must be filled in by the photographer as well as us viewers. For even if the photographs are a documentary processing of the course of the photographer's past events, the images are not pure documentation. Janik Bürgin reveals intimate memories, experiences, emotions and allows the viewer not only an insight into his world, but challenges them to understand the photographs from their own perspective and to apply them to their own experiences. In this series, Bürgin succeeds not only in revealing a large piece of his personal reality, but also allows the experience of an individual pictorial experience.
WALKING WITH THE WIND is an exploration of the flow of life, from source to mouth. Every unpredictable current, every massive rock, every sudden rainfall guides the flowing water in its course. Chance and fate.

Janik Bürgin
The photographic work of Janik Bürgin (b. 1994) is structured along serial focal points whose formal language oscillates between abstraction and figuration, close-up and distant views. Bürgin explores the medium of photography with deliberate painterly endeavors: He engages with the traditional genres of painting to create images of people, landscapes, and situations that emerge from his own reality. Moreover, the artist uses the means of photography to develop a pictorial language, which, in a way, approaches that of abstract painting. The high-contrast color surfaces and gently curved fragments of shapes, however, are not due to the absence of a concrete reference to an object. The Swiss artist’s initial reference points are always tangible, plastic objects, which, due to the given close-up view and their resulting obscurity, are reduced to the sensory properties of color and form. In this respect, Bürgin plays with the visual limits and the medial mutability of photography. He opens up fundamental discourses that occupy our time as much as they define it: philosophical-existential questions that address fate and chance, or critical examinations of the increasing pollution of our planet by plastic waste. Original text (German): Marlen Bürgi