Jiajia Zhang works with photography and video. These digital, often moving images she presents in spatial installations. She rearranges the partly self-produced, partly found material in the process of creating the works and in doing so creates unexpected thematic and visual references, for example, in one of her latest video works Social Gifts (2023) she combines Gertrude Stein’s text What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them from 1936 with contemporary definitions of the figure of the influencer. In addition to the images, texts (sometimes in the form of subtitles, sometimes as voice-overs) and music also play an important role. Jiajia Zhang is particularly interested in the changing connotations of private and public spaces – in social media and in real urban space. In conversation with Quinn Latimer and Gioia Dal Molinshe gives an insight into her work on a new video and her exploration of different forms of presentation in exhibition spaces.

2 Boys Broken Hearts
Dörflistrasse 67
8050 Zürich

Jiajia Zhang studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 2001 to 2007 and photography at the International Center of Photography, NY, from 2007 to 2008. In 2020, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her work has been part of various exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (2023), Fluentum, Berlin (2022), Swiss Art Awards, Basel (2022); Werkstipendium Zürich (2022); FriArt, Fribourg (2022); Coalmine Gallery, Winterthur (2021); Kunsthaus Glarus (2021); Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris (2021); Haus Wien (2020); Kunsthalle Zürich (2020); Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2019).

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, editor, and occasional curator. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings have appeared in Artforum, The Paris Review, The White Review, and Texte zur Kunst, and in many critical anthologies and artist monographs. She recently curated SIREN (some poetics), which explored technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, at Amant, New York (2022). Perpetual Language, featuring the work of Patricia L. Boyd and Na Mira, and under the dual influence of Roland Barthes and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, opens at Croy Nielsen in Vienna this September. Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. She is Head of the MA at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) in Basel, where she is also a PhD candidate.

Gioia Dal Molin is Head Curator at Istituto Svizzero in Rome, Milan and Palermo. She studied history and history of art at University of Zürich and completed her PhD in 2014. Among other things she is currently working on an exhibition with Jiajia Zhang at Istituto Svizzero in Milano in February 2024.