Bignia Wehrli

Bignia Wehrli (*1979) is based in Berlin and Sternenberg (Switzerland). She studied art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (Germany) at the École des Beaux-Arts Paris (France) and at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou (China). Her work has been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions including in 2022 «Being Theoria: The 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art», Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou (China), «Forming Comunities: Berliner Wege», Kindl - Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, in 2020 «Magia Naturalis», Sariev Gallery, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), in 2019 «Leichter als Luft», Altana Galerie, Dresden and in 2018 her solo show «Den Horizont in der Hand halten» at Kunsthalle Winterthur.

Bignia Wehrli produces instruments for the transformation of signs. For example, she transfers geodetic measurements into sound, contour lines into colored yarns, and starlight into cryptic drawings, and she lets the sunlight draw circles over the Rhine. In doing so, the artist sees herself less as a designer than as a "causer".

Philosopher Boyan Manchev writes about Wehrli's work: „Ultimately, the operation at stake in Wehrli’s performance-based visual artwork could be perceived as an outstanding example of a new type of artistic operation. Namely, an artistic operation where the media are conceived as dynamic transformers, meant to inject autonomous agency and therefore autonomous will to an inanimate agent (or patient) thus opening a possibility for non-human actors to enter the stage of (aesthetic) production of meaning. But in this operation the substance of the human body – the subjective consistency – is not erased. (Boyan Manchev, The Theatre of Miracles, in: Bignia Wehrli, Instrumentarium, Zürich 2018).

Submitted by Lechbinska Gallery