Barbara Kiener "Lion Ride"

Performative Intervention

From 30th September, 09:00 a.m. to 1st October, 09:00 a.m. the action artist, performer and visual artist Barbara Kiener will be standing on a raft in the pond in front of the Lion Monument in pose of the lion. She stages the silence as a moving momentum ...

Date30th September - 1st October, 2020
Time9 a.m. to 9 a.m.
LocationLionmonument Lucerne
EventPerformative Intervention

Barbara Kiener – «Lion Ride»

Performative Intervention

For L21, Kiener realizes a site- and space-specific performance entitled “Lion Ride”. The artist uses the lion monument for a performative intervention by imitating the lying position of the lion on a floating platform constructed for Kiener in the pond (140cm x 200cm).

For her intervention Kiener uses a raft, a watercraft of great importance in the history of mankind, which gained sad fame with the refugee movements of the recent past and with Théodore Géricault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), which refers to the tragic rescue attempt from the run aground frigate Méduse (1816).

In times in which we are confronted with images in the media of how people seeking shelter on rafts seek a safer life and often die in the process, the artist Barbara Kiener stages the silent perseverance on the raft as her form of criticism of waiting for politically, socially and humanly better times. She recalls the consequences of war, just as the monument commemorates the Swiss guards who fell in Paris on August 10, 1792, during the storming of the Tuileries’ royal palace by revolutionaries. Its 24-hour lay-up on the raft illustrates the paralysis visible from the outside in the face of the tragedies that take place in the Mediterranean and everywhere else when there is war. From the raft she performs the change of perspective: she observes the audience and the audience observes her. In this encounter, silence becomes a moving moment, leaving space to reflect on monuments, wars, the fin and flight…