Sandra Knecht: Home Is a Foreign Place
10th January, 2025 to 27th April, 2025
Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G
Spitalstrasse 18
4056 Basel – Schweiz
The artist Sandra Knecht defies categorization. No number of labels can do her justice. Her project at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G is proof of this. Home Is a Foreign Place is not merely an art exhibition; it’s a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a total work of art that incorporates various media and engages the senses. — Raphael Suter, Director, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G
Swiss artist Sandra Knecht (*1968 in Zurich, lives and works in Buus/BL) has been exploring the concept of “home” for over a decade. For Knecht, home is a fluid concept, constantly renegotiated, both individual and ephemeral. Her art delves into what home, as an unknown place, means in geographic, historical, sociological, philosophical, and culinary terms.
Sandra Knecht – HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE,
Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger I KBH.G, in
Collaboration with Lukas Wassmann. Photo: Lukas Wassmann.
The exhibition Home Is a Foreign Place at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G addresses the concept of home in various ways – as a feeling, a place, and an idea. It questions how our understanding of home evolves and how deeply it impacts human existence. This exhibition is the result of ten years of intense research and artistic work, in which Knecht has consistently pursued her examination of themes like home, identity, and diversity. Home Is a Foreign Place represents the concentrated culmination of Sandra Knecht’s practice and is her most extensive solo exhibition to date.
Sandra Knecht’s personal path to art, like her work, is unconventional. In 2011, she began studying visual art after spending over two decades working as a social worker. Her profession often brought her into the kitchens of the families she worked with, where they cooked together, exchanging culinary traditions and building bridges. These experiences continue to nourish her artistic practice. Knecht’s research is always long-term and materializes itself in various formats: installation, archive, photography, poetry, video, sound, performance, sculpture, and culinary art.
Living in Buus, a small village where Knecht resides with her partner and many animals, is inseparable from her artistic work. “All the plants and animals have at one point been integrated into artworks. They live here with us until they die,” says Knecht. These living beings are essential actors in her art. This coexistence with the animals in the village is her living studio, where artworks are conceived and realized. Since 2014, Knecht has documented this practice in her long-term research project My Land Is Your Land (2014–ongoing), a series of 20,000 photographs she has published on her Facebook account. A comprehensive and never-before-seen selection of these images will be shown in the exhibition. The photographs serve as both time and mood documents, capturing daily life in Buus and the everyday relationship between humans and animals.
Sandra Knecht – HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE,
Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger I KBH.G, in
Collaboration with Lukas Wassmann. Photo: Lukas Wassmann.
A significant aspect of Sandra Knecht’s oeuvre is the culinary performance, where she creates more than just dishes – she crafts performative artworks as social sculptures. For Home Is a Foreign Place, Knecht has composed a total of 32 flavor profiles. These intimate portraits are each dedicated to a female artist who has challenged her in her thinking and in her view of the world, as well as her own position within it. In doing so, these artists’ works, or certain aspects of them, became Sandra’s home.
For example, the flavor profile for Nan Goldin: a sugar cube infused with 20 drops of homemade and self-concocted bitter schnaps. Other artists include Patti Smith, Virginie Despentes, PJ Harvey, Etel Adnan, and Ana Mendieta. Knecht’s vision behind choosing these artists was that they would all sit together at one table, engaging in conversation as they consumed the dishes. The flavor profiles are presented as recipe posters in the exhibition’s accompanying book. These custom recipes become a “work within the work,” reflecting Knecht’s artistic essence and embodying the complex relationship between art, identity, memory, and humor.
Home Is a Foreign Place invites us to search for the unknown within ourselves. For Sandra Knecht, food is a boundary-crossing experience: eating means devotion and is a sensory activity. Through food, we connect with others. It’s a process of dissolving boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, nature and culture.
Sandra Knecht – HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE,
Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger I KBH.G, in
Collaboration with Lukas Wassmann. Photo: Lukas Wassmann.
Books play a primary role in Sandra Knecht’s artistic practice. They act as a living archive, documenting her extensive body of work. The publication accompanying the exhibition Home Is a Foreign Place brings together self-portraits, photos, mixtapes, texts, interviews, as well as the flavor profiles and biographies of the artists who have influenced Knecht. This archive will be physically accessible in the exhibition itself: specific works and objects from these artists will be displayed. They make Knecht’s search for home tangible and deepen the engagement with themes such as pain, longing, community, responsibility, and sustainability.
Home Is a Foreign Place is a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a total work of art that presents Knecht’s artistic practice in a multifaceted way, encouraging visitors to engage with both the foreign and the familiar within themselves.
Sandra Knecht: Home Is a Foreign Place opens on the 10th of January, 2025 to the 27th of April, 2025 at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G
©2024 Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger
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