Wednesday, 23 March 2022, 07 pm

With Matthias Gabi, Franziska Schott & Marco Schibig, moderated by Yasmin Afschar, Co-Organisatorin Le Foyer – In Process

In the archive of the Kunsthalle Bern, a find aroused Matthias Gabi’s (*1981, lives in Zurich) interest: approximately 2,500 printing plates with art reproductions, so-called print clichés, are stored here – without any obvious purpose, as pictorial memories of past exhibitions and evidence of forgotten letterpress printing processes. In the past, the plates were used to print the image pages in the exhibition catalogs, but after the advent of offset printing in the 1970s, they became superfluous and were consequently disposed of in many places. Not so at the Kunsthalle Bern. Gabi has activated the silent potential of this unique stock in an artist’s publication and “re-staged” the old process with selected plates. Together with Franziska Schott & Marco Schibig, who have designed numerous publications for the Kunsthalle Bern, he discusses the questions that arise from this process of analyzing, selecting, compiling and producing. Print clichés from the Kunsthalle archive will serve as illustrative material. 

The conversation will be followed by an aperitif.