Studio Visit
Julie Becker, Francesco De Bernardi, gora gora bookstore (Rafał Skoczek), Gilles Jacot, Morag Keil, Tamara Vepkhvadze
organized by Julia Künzi and Johanna Vieli

22 August – 9 September 2025
Opening August 21, 6–8 pm

A plain stairwell, a heavy entrance door, a worn-out wooden floor. The exhibition space BINZ39 is a patchwork of several small compartments within two larger rooms, scattered throughout with doors. They lead to artist studios, to the toilet (right-hand door directly behind the kitchen), to the storage room. The exhibition Studio Visit is not a studio visit. Most of the doors remain closed. In the exhibited works, the studio appears as a place of production, as community space, stage, scarce commodity, luxury, storage, draft, shop, and a place to rest.

The work Federal State Building with Music (2002) by Julie Becker (1972–2016) offers phantasmagoric insights into her private living and working situation in Los Angeles in the 2000s, and how this is entangled with precarious living realities and economic growth, the urban environment, local communities, and gentrification processes.

Starting from The Mustache (Emmanuel Carrère, 1986), a puzzling comedy revolving around the existence of this defining facial feature, Francesco De Bernardi (*1995) traces in Getting Attached to (A) is Difficult feelings such as uncertainty, doubt, and indecision—introspections that can shape the mood both in bed and in the studio.

Red Shelf (2025) by Rafal Skoczek (*1989) hosts the artists’ initiative gora gora bookstore (established 2020) for the duration of the exhibition. The work is a one-to-one replica of a structure from the formerly occupied Friedensgasse, advocating for the reclamation of empty spaces and the creation of collective infrastructure.

Morag Keil (*1985) shows us the art experience of PDFs and Instagram feeds: dematerialized, flattened, pixelated. The DIY posters document an exhibition she held last year in Paris, which itself was a reenactment of her fair presentation at FIAC in 2011.

The works of Gilles Jacot (*1990) explore the aesthetics and ideology of living space under gentrification and neoliberal conditions and use these as a basis for painterly and gestural expressions.

Tamara Vepkhvadze’s (*2003) compositions possess a life of their own. Traces and markings of a past existence are part of her expression. In a new configuration, they may carry the traces of Studio Visit within them.

The conditions of production and distribution are staged in the works and accentuated by the placeholder of the studio. These open doorways reveal parameters such as luck, class, networks, cliques, attitudes, and infrastructures.

The exhibition and gora gora bookstore are open during opening times and by appointment.