Batia Suter

Batia Suter has been collecting books and magazines for over twenty years. Most of them are second-hand and include scientific papers, glossaries, promotional catalogues, art and history books, periodicals on the animal kingdom, and much more. These pages provide the raw material for her artistic practice, whereby she extracts, decontextualises, and correlates images to reveal them in a new light. Her extensive project Radial Grammar is showcased in an exhibition, a book, and a video. This visual montage evokes a bookshop packed with treasures and encyclopaedias. In L’Appartement, the projection evokes the giant sphere of the Chiesa Madre in the town of Gibellina, Italy. Suter designed this slide show for a monumental videomapping as part of the for the bienniale Images Gibellina 2021. The fluidity takes us on a mysterious visual journey through iconography, the formal and narrative characteristics of images.

In Radial Grammar, Batia Suter turns the world of old books into a mental landscape where images and knowledge are continually reshaped. Using scanned fragments from encyclopaedias and technical manuals, she constructs a geometric universe dominated by the sphere—an emblem that recalls both the origin of the cosmos and the magnetic pull of the unknown. Here, the microscopic meets the colossal in a symbolic forest navigated by intuition. In Gibellina, Radial Grammar appears as a film projected in loop onto the perfectly spherical apse of the Chiesa Madre, creating an immersive encounter where architecture and moving image merge. Suter reveals the hypnotic force of images when they communicate through their own internal logic.

Batia Suter has been collecting books and magazines since the late 1990s. Most of them are second-hand and she sees them as imagery in the true sense of the word, and a source of inspiration for her art. They provide raw material for her work, to create a visual montage presenting images in a context that shows them in a different light. The frontage of Vevey’s lakeside Municipal Library becomes an arctic landscape, as a huge icebreaker can be seen face on, seemingly heading for Lake Geneva, while a colony of penguins observes the proceedings. Meanwhile, the fire station has been covered by a picture of a fire, just like those fire-fighters battle against on a daily basis. This striking trompe-l’œil creates the illusion of flames raging on the place dedicated to fighting them.