Ghost Note

Bianca Barandun (*1984) is the prize-winner of the Bündner Kunstverein Art Prize 2024. She grew up in Rodels and today commutes between Essen and Graubünden. In the space filling installation “Ghost Note” in the Labor of the Art Museum Graubünden she is concerned with memory and language. While she used the memories of others as source material in her work “Silos” in the Annual Exhibition 2023, the artist now drew on her own resources for “Ghost Note”: Her observations of the birds in the garden of her parents’ house in Rodels. This resulted in a collection of different materials, with which Barandun created a new series of sculptures made of wood. In music a “Ghost Note” is a muted note used as an upbeat for the following one, and as such is decisive for the dynamics of the entire piece. It is a build-up, is at once there and also not there. Bianca Barandun is interested in the oscillation between presence and absence. That is what her interest in memories is all about. Just as in a piece of music, narratives are shaped by concentrations and accelerations – depending on how fresh the memory still is. Barandun transfers this concept into the exhibition space in a poetic way. When one moves around between the wooden sculptures, one senses a rhythm: In varying intervals elongated wooden frames are placed alongside each other on the floor. It is these intervals that determine the rhythm of the space. Again and again empty spaces appear in the installation as protagonists: as an interval between the objects, as a negative space within the frames, as a hollow space, as a circle on the surface of the wall. They are a space-creating element between remembering and forgetting, between presence and absence.