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THE EVENT: ART SNEAKS INTO THE CITY TRANSFERT - art in the city space. Thirty-nine artists (Europe, USA, Thailand) have been invited to work in the urban setting. They sneak into the city's infrastructures and question art's ability to work its way into our everyday lives. TRANSFERT is the 10th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition to be held in Bienne. The first exhibition in this series – a pioneering one in its determination to show art in the public place – dates back to 1954, the last one to 1991. This major show is under the patronage of a committee made up of personalities like Ruth Dreifuss, Moritz Leuenberer, Yvette Jaggi, Herzog & de Meuron, Simon de Pury, etc. A voluminous, 480-page catalogue (Engl./Ger./Fr.) is being published to accompany the exhibition. DATES 17 June - 31 August 2000. Official opening: 17 June 2000 at 6 p.m. PLACE Bienne, in the city centre. Perimeter bounded by the Place Centrale, Place Guisan and the Conference Centre. (A poster programme produced by four international artists will be simultaneously on view in the following streets; Basel, Berlin, Bern, Bienne, Dijon, Genève, Hamburg, London, Neuchâtel and Paris). OPENING HOURS Daily round the clock (except for shop opening hours for certain works). THE ARTISTS Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (F), Stefan Banz (CH), Olivier Blanckart (F), Etienne Bossut (F), Olaf Breuning (CH), Roderick Buchanan (SCO), Christoph Büchel (CH), Patrick Corillon (B), Simone Decker (LUX), Jeremy Deller (GB), Daniel Firman (F), Jean-Damien Fleury (CH), Peter Garfield (USA), Ulrike Gruber (D), Fabrice Gygi (CH), Alexander Gyoerfi (D), Jens Haaning (DAN), Eric Hattan (CH), Lori Hersberger (CH), Henrik Plenge Jakobsen (DAN), Surasi Kusolwong (THAI), Peter Land (DAN), Abigail Lane (GB), Lang/Baumann (CH), Mathieu Mercier (F), Thom Merrick (USA), Jonathan Monk (GB), Olivier Mosset (CH), Gianni Motti (I), Daniel Pflumm (D), Philippe Ramette (F), Relax (CH), Christian Robert-Tissot (CH), Daniel Ruggiero (I), Roman Signer (CH), Nika Spalinger (CH), Uri Tzaig (ISR), Erwin Wurm (A), Dana Wyse (CAN). DIRECTOR Marc-Olivier Wahler (artistic director of the CAN Neuchâtel Art Centre; art critic). INFORMATION Tel. : +41 (0)32 322 3120. Fax : +41 (0)32 322 6488. info@transfert-b.ch www.transfert-b.ch.

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THE GRAFT TRANSFERT focuses on the concepts of graft and injection, over and above the idea of addition and supplement. Thus the artists proposes a prevailing consideration of the city’s existing infrastructures (roofs, balustrades, street lamps, tarmac, shops, façades, posters, vehicles, ventilation ducts, newspapers, TV, etc) with the keen desire to push the logical systems behind each infrastructure to their uttermost, not to say absurd, limits. Some artists, to give an example, propose a fire scheduled to happen three times a day, a sneezing dustbin, choreographies performed by bikers, hints for making products vanish, and hints for camouflage in one’s own home, an Angst tree, a security zone for the Conference Centre, a dam for the Suze canal, ventilation ducts for a motorway tunnel, a robot for tossing bread to birds, giant aquaria, a space for the future, an unbearable Jazz Band playing the loveliest music in the world, pills for turning blond, Protestant or artist... Present-day art is no longer set facing the world the better to study and describe it. It sneaks inside the world, plying the host of networks being woven by our reality day in day out. It operates more within a logic of movement and speed than in a logic of representation. By distorting the rules of visibility, today’s artists are formulating an actual aesthetics of stealth. THE ZONE Paying particular attention to the exhibition concept, TRANSFERT delimits a zone lying between three major geographical points, and, through a dynamic system of linkages, encourages a dialogue between the works and consequently between the works and their context of inclusion. The work is no longer on its own vis-à-vis the city. Visitors no longer scour the streets in search of the works. They find themselves at the hub of a zone scanned by space-time phenomena that are forever changing. A visit to an exhibition is not approached the same way as a walk in the city. A fluctuation is inevitably created between the state of mind suited to the discovery of an exhibition and the state of mind that we experience on a daily basis when we walk around a city. This constant fluctuation is essential here. Above all else, it represents a vehicle of energy. While artistic practices are handled through their user value, it is crucial to introduce them into the very place of exchange and energy represented by the city. THE CATALOGUE Artists' references are no longer drawn from an art system, which, by its very self-legitimising and tautological nature, has managed to offer a rest area, an offshore platform where the din of the world is broken down into a rustling sound, adjusted like conditioned air. Their references are urban. They are organized within the flows which criss-cross streets, outskirts and passages. The 480-page exhibition catalogue (Engl./Ger./Fr.) encompasses this state of affairs. In addition to the usual information about the works and the exhibition, the catalogue proposes reference systems formulated in the form of a personal pantheon by the TRANSFERT artists and subsequently developed by authors such as Martin Conrads (Ger), Joshua Decter (USA), Jean-Charles Masséra (F), Olivier Mosset (CH), Frank Perrin (F) and Marc-Olivier Wahler (CH).

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