Gérald Minkoff (1937)
Switzerland


Biography :

"After sailing to discover the Americas, Gérald Minkoff studied biology, geology and anthropology at the University of Geneva. From this long journey he will retain an intense curiosity for the cultures of “elsewhere”, essential to his understanding of the world. He met Muriel Olesen in 1967, with whom he lived until her death in 2009. Together, they formed a couple of artists, working side by side, as explained by Minkoff: "one another making his photographs as everyone would keep a journal.” They bring back photos from their multiple travels around the world which, presented in pairs, show their shared and shared perspectives. Thus the series Meteorites of Love (2002) where, in the morning, everyone photographed the bedding gathered into a ball on the new bed they had just left.

Gérald Minkoff uses a wide diversity of mediums in his practice. In 1964, he made his first drawings on television screens (TV Drawings). Four years later, he approached the video medium, explored the potential of Polaroids and, shortly after, integrated the Braille alphabet into his practice. His meeting with the writer Michel Butor led him, from 1967, to collaborate with him on several artist books. At the threshold of the 1970s, he appeared as a pioneer of video art in Switzerland with the installation Stereodorat. He quickly produced performances with a camera and monitor, as well as closed circuit videos (a system where the capture, production and perception of images are concomitant) and integrated the laser into his installations. He is invited by the Impact Gallery in Lausanne to exhibit, under the title “Action Film Vidéo”, with René Bauermeister, Jean Otth, Janos Urban and Muriel Olesen. The group was subsequently nicknamed “The Musketeers of the Invisible” by René Berger, director-curator of the Musée cantonal des beaux-arts de Lausanne, from 1962 to 1981. Under his leadership, the quintet found itself in the manifestation of what would become the first edition of the Locarno Video Art Festival, in 1980."

(Source and rest of the biography, website, SIK)

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