Phung-Tien Phan “Kartoffel”

Description

“Kartoffel” (German for potato): what more prosaic thing than this lowly root vegetable could there be, whose name also happens to be a derogatory term used to describe Germans? German-Vietnamese artist Phung-Tien Phan (*1983) takes up the potato, in its casual-but-hearty ordinariness and its capacity to stand in for cultural identity as the thread running through her exhibition. Featuring all-new sculpture, video, and installation, Kartoffel, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, reveals a practice that explores diasporic experience, female labor, and late capitalist modes of production in ways that are simultaneously tender, lo-fi, and humorous.