Sandra Knecht, Home Is a Foreign Place8 Images
Normally, Sandra Knecht lives a very private life. The Swiss artist’s home and studio is based in Buus, a small village tucked away in the countryside outside Basel, where she also raises goats, chickens, and a much-loved turkey named Kurt. In her latest exhibition, however, she transports that private life into the very centre of the city, occupying a gallery space at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (KBH.G). It’s a bold and vulnerable move, and not one she intends to repeat anytime soon. “For this exhibition, my land is your land,” she tells Dazed. “You can come inside. For three months. Then it stops.”
Titled Home Is a Foreign Place, the show continues Knecht’s longtime exploration of Heimat – literally: “home” or “homeland” – in both a physical and spiritual sense. It’s a subject matter that predates her career as an artist, she notes, tracing it back to coming out as a queer teenager in a religious family, plus her 25 years as a social worker, dealing with the traumatic after-effects of war. For displaced people especially, she says: “Home is very important… the smells, what you’re eating, and the aesthetics.” Since embarking on her art career, this exploration has also taken the shape of group meals and community projects (in other words, she isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty).
At first glance, the art takes on a slightly more conventional form at KBH.G. A deconstructed barn is scattered around the gallery space, alongside decommissioned beehives, and sculptures inspired by Louise Bourgeois (echoed, as Knecht points out, by the shrivelled-up spiders in the barn’s eaves). Elsewhere, self-portraits show the artist in the horned costume of Swiss winter rituals, putting a folkloric spin on her past life, anchored in drag nights and Europe’s club culture.
From chickens, to dogs, insects, and human beings, Knecht herself says how much she loves to be surrounded by living things, and that’s made very clear in the exhibition. But there’s another recurring theme, as well: corpses. Dead cats are presented mummified or cast in bronze. Bird skeletons are turned into fragile, intricate sculptures. A chicken’s egg – laid during the panic of a fox attack – is preserved as a “century egg”. In the photographs on the wall, slabs of raw red meat hang ready for the butcher.
To some extent, these corpses – alongside a more palatable shelf of pickled vegetables – speak to a common desire of all artists: to preserve moments in time, whether that’s through photographs, casts, language, or paint. But they’re also just an inevitable by-product of the act of living, Knecht notes, demonstrating her pragmatic approach to the life cycles of the natural world (that is, a natural world inhabited by humans as well). Later, on the muddy slopes of Buus, she proudly shows off her goats. “They fight, they fuck, they eat, and they sleep,” she says. “Four years later, we make sausage.”
In fact, visitors at the opening of Home Is a Foreign Place get to experience the taste of goat sausage first hand (unless, like me, they’re vegetarian – then they get a fried carrot). Slaughtered the day before, the animal was raised by Knecht for several years, prepared to her own recipe, and served by Buus locals, many of whom also appear in the artist’s photographs. To her, it’s all inseparable – the art, the community, the animals, and her home, all embedded in a changing natural landscape.
“My art is a part of nature, and nature is also a part of my art,” she explains. “I [spend] every day by my animals. They are a part of my life. In the art world, many artists make photos with animals, or work with animals […] but when their exhibitions end, the plants and animals end… they are dead, sausages or compost.”
Knecht’s goat may be sausages too, but it’s clear that it was regarded as much more than just an art object. Vice versa, every object in her show is something more than just ‘art’ – each represents a whole way of living, of being inside nature, and of shaping the place we call home.
Home Is a Foreign Place runs at KBH.G until April 27, 2025.
