print   back Hidden Among the Leaves a collaborative installation by Shelly Silver and Nika Spalinger Dr. Verena Villiger from Shelly Silver: Video, Museum for Art & History, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2001 For several years now, Nika Spalinger has been realizing projects in public spaces. In these works, situations often arise in which passers-by are drawn into a kind of game for which they don't exactly know the rules. In a society that spends more and more time in computer-generated worlds and demonstrates a tendency towards infantility, playing, often regarded as the opposite of work, is imbued with a new significance. The relationships between art and play, both of which are social realms with their own rules, are the focal point of Nika Spalinger`s interest. When she received a scholarship to go to New York, Spalinger met the filmmaker and video artist Shelly Silver, who, for her part, questions socially accepted notions of identity, nationality, language, family and sexuality. Exploring many different scenarios (mother-daughter relationships in Japan, German identity following the Reunification, an ironic retelling of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, etc.) she observes the fragile constructs that determine our social perception. Her films are always imbued with a keen awareness of situations in transition. The Swiss artist invited the American to do a joint project at the Museum for Art and History in Fribourg, where the most different means of expression - here spatial intervention, there video - would be used to build a sum greater than these two separate parts. In response to the question of the content their planned exhibition would address, the two artists named the following keywords and phrases: the public and the private; the space between ourselves and others; the conventions that not only separate us but which also make it possible for us to live together. An arm mistakenly brushed against making for an unintentional and yet pleasant contact; the warmth generated by a nearby body; a fragment of conversation overhead by chance.... Human life plays in the charged field between the protected space of personal intimacy and the social structure in which we relate to other individuals. Today this ambivalence is usually treated with a critical regard for the alienation of our society. But the fundamental experience of being in a crowd with untold others yet completely lost within oneself, and then suddenly awakening to feel connected with all those surrounding you, doesn't have to be a painful one. It can also be very beautiful. We live in a texture of interplaying looks. And now, even the most fleeting of looks, lasting only a fraction of a second and then lost, can be recorded on video. Are the countless recording devices of tourists, security officers and artists turning the stuff of our lives into a film being made outside our control? Yet the model of totalitarian surveillance, in the sense of George Orwell's 'Big Brother,' is contrasted by the plurality of gazes. In the game that is our lives, everyone is active and passive, filming and being filmed, hidden and visible at the same time. Dr. Verena Villiger Fribourg, 2000 Dr. Verena Villiger is a Curator at the Museum of Art and History in Fribourg, Switzerland Shelly Silver: Video, Museum for Art & History, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2001, pg. 36-37 page top