Christoph Draeger

Born 1965 in Zurich (Switzerland). Lives and works in Zurich and New York.  

From 1986 to 1990 Christoph Draeger studied visual arts at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels. There he quickly came to define his signature theme: catastrophe, which he explores in the form of sculptures, installations, paintings and photographic series. The artist is particularly interested in the impact and the authenticity of the images conveyed by the media, images of the disasters that afflict human activity. In 1994 he made large-scale photographs of models of destroyed imaginary towns. After that he turned towards images of natural disasters, accidents and terrorist acts. Draeger seems to be particularly fascinated by air crashes, which punctuate his work, even if the closest he has come to a catastrophe in his personal life is a minor car crash.

In Toulouse, Draeger is presenting the video installation Black September, which evokes the grim episode of the Israeli athletes taken hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics by a Palestinian commando named Black September. Forty years after this bloody tragedy, the artist recreated the hotel room where the hostages and the terrorists watched the live TV news relating both the event and the progress of the police. On a similar television we see period footage, which means that past and present mix together here, as do actors and spectators. In this work, too, Draeger is suggesting that violence and its simultaneous illustration, like the globalisation of the image and of terrorism, are intimately linked. This work also reminds us that the Israelo-Palestinian conflict remains as burningly topical now as it was then, forty years ago.

Another work, on another bloody conflict, Mondrian Criminals: The Crime of the Century (2011) refers to the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. In this picture comprised of twenty portraits, the artist ambiguously puts the names of American box office stars on the images of war criminals. Thus, Slobodan Milosevic, here, is Dustin Hoffmann. War, cinema, violence and fetishised images all come together. Cinema as the continuation of war by other means? The troubling thing is when everything is said.