Batia Suter

Batia Suter, born in Switzerland and based in Amsterdam, studied at the art academies of Zurich (CH) and Arnhem (NL), and was also trained at Werkplaats Typografie. Suter creates monumental installations of digitally manipulated images for specific locations, working on photo-animations, image sequences, and collages, often using historically sourced images from archives or publications. In 2007 and 2016, she published Parallel Encyclopedia and Parallel Encyclopedia #2, artist books based on compositions of images taken from old books she has collected over the years. Her other books Surface Series, Radial Grammar, and Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) are evocative montages of found images, exploring the various resonances of forms and geological landscapes, visual surfaces, and image structures. The artwork produced for the “Arcadia” exhibition is part of a larger series called Hexamiles, initiated in 2019 with a project at the Mont-Voisin dam. This series includes a publication, a film, and several installations as part of a group work on the perception of landscapes, which is still ongoing. The images are collected from old books, specifically works published between 1910 and 1950, and for the exhibition in Lugano, the chosen images are old views of the Himalayas, Bolivia, Indonesia, and South Africa that blend to form an indefinable place. This connection with Ticino is reinforced by the vision of this region as a mysterious area where different ecosystems intertwine. The series explores the conflict between different aspects of the power of landscapes: rough and threatening wilderness versus an idealized and safe paradise, a complex and overflowing jungle versus a perfect Garden of Eden. The plants depicted are both parasites and survivors, notably recalling the implantation of palm trees in Ticino.