Beat Kuert

1970s: Early experiences

Beat Kuert was trained in the visual arts in the 1960s and 1970s in Zurich. At the time, artists felt the need to take to the streets, breaking down traditional barriers between intellectuals and workers, between creators and viewers. While sharing those ideas and drawing on the vitality of that period, Kuert chose to make his first film in a natural setting, conducting a dialogue with his inner world and filming in the mountains. His works sought an introspective point of view and this aspect is still a constant in his work. Turnus Film AG in Zurich noticed the artist's experimental short films and documentaries, and between 1968 and 1970 Kuert worked for the company as an editor and director. In 1971, during a nine-month trip to Latin America, he shot his first feature-length documentary, Ein Erfolg unserer Entwicklungshilfe, examining development policies in Latin America.

Debut

As an independent filmmaker he made his debut in 1974 with the full-length film Mulungu, based on a Swiss German legend. The film tells the story of an architect who, after an accident on a glacier, has continuous encounters with a girl-goat sacrificed to the Goat God Mulungu. The myth would remain a recurrent motif for Kuert.

Statement

Kuert’s stories examine the experience of individual men overwhelmed by a feeling of emptiness that leads to violence and tragedy. In 1979 he shot Schilten, a feature film based on a novel by Hermann Burger.

Personal life

In 1979 he married the television producer Barbara Riesen and they had a son, the film director and screenwriter Lucius C. Kuert.

1980s: "Al Castello" film productions

By the early Eighties Kuert gained a reputation as an accomplished experimental film director and producer. His repertoire was characterized by constant research into images and their possible manipulation and experimentation. Many of his stories are based on literary works in which the subject revolves around time. In Warten auf, a short film based on the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Kuert interprets time as the eternal expectation of something that never comes. The 1982 fictional documentary Die Zeit ist böse, based on the novel "Der barmherzige Hügel" by Lore Berger, reveals the growing malaise of the leading character, locked into a meaningless and endless routine of work and study. The lack of inspiration to live even to the next day pushes her to extreme measures. The director chose to stage the suicide from the tower where the anti-heroine went every day until her death, and he exploits the powerful contrast between light and darkness. In these films time is stopped and ends with acquiescent agony. In 1985 Kuert left Zurich and with other directors and producers founded Al Castello, an independent film production based in Arzo, in southern Switzerland.

1990s: Architecture documentaries

In 1996 Kuert directed several documentaries about some of the key figures in contemporary architecture: Jean Nouvel, Mario Botta, Herzog & de Meuron, Luigi Snozzi, Max Dudler. For this works Kuert used a particular point of view as well as a personal style to convey each architect’s vision and aesthetic sense.

2000s: dust&scratches

From 2000 to 2006 Kuert taught at the Zelig School of Documentary and Television of Bolzano (Italy) and was professor of Visual Arts at the University of Supsi Lugano (Switzerland). Kuert has long felt it important to build his art as a creative container that, starting with its conception, includes the free and continuous interdisciplinary integration of the various artistic languages – video art, live performance, poetry, music, photography – to produce a complete and complex event. In 2005, after directing and producing the experimental film Tre artiste, Kuert put together a group of performers, musicians, photographers, dancers, and actors and set up headquarters in Arzo (Switzerland) to conceive, develop, and produce new projects. He founded the group dust&scratches, an artistic workshop that acts as a live connector of different energies. Through its synergy, the group attempts to generate a new way of thinking about art that develops a strong artistic identity through continuous contamination and happenings. Many of the artists who have been involved in it or are currently participants have stated that the dust&scratches artistic workshop has represented a decisive moment in the development of their careers.

Artistic research

The process leading Kuert from experimental films to the figurative arts is marked by his search for the quintessential image that can encompass this intense energy as it unfolds. To achieve this goal, through performance Kuert first materializes a world where he immerses the spectator in his vision, subject to the conditions imposed by the spaces in which the performance takes place. Still images obtained from this experience seem to be composed of figures, but they are often enhanced with other languages – calligraphy, texts, and music staffs – and enriched with expressive titles often related to myths or to works evoked by the artist. Reworked in the studio, in a subsequent investigation his images express things that have never ceased to exist, but that continue in the eyes of the audience and that strive to awaken the desire to "be" the change we are waiting for.

Artistic path

Kuert’s work investigates human existential dilemmas. The first theme he develops is related to time. His film characters experience eternal agony that often turns into tragedy. This is the first expression of pain and deep agony that Kuert identifies as stagnation. The expression of this distress grows in a violent scream to affirm one’s self or to look for an answer. In the Donna Carnivora project, his characters are destructive and they powerfully express their agony. They are presented as mythical figures, always female, since it is in the woman’s image that he distinguishes the vital and sensual element that ultimately transcends the carnal aspect to become a symbol of humankind. The stillness, the boundaries, the outlined contours of the figures have the same meaning in Kuert's works. In his poetics, color and a sense of movement prevail over the subject’s precise definition, as can be seen in Destroyed Lines, asserting the desire for greater fluidity. The goal is to represent emotions and bring together – through their depiction – the keys to access an inner world. This goal is always inspired by the fullest incitement experience can offer. When Kuert comes into contact with Eastern philosophies, he opens his horizons to new themes, as in Kan-Longing for Rain; he discovers how destruction and chaos can become the engine for new regeneration or change. He expresses the idea that it is not death that represents the end, but the lack of movement. With the development of the Wunderkammer, Kuert's cabinet of curiosities, his vision of the world multiplies, because there are many coexisting realities that are always slightly different yet are always part of a whole. Kuert shares with the viewer the astonishment he feels as he probes the human soul and he strives to make us want to grasp this wonder from everyday life. The sense of hope, of energy, that lingers in everything around us is also expressed in the Moving Mountains and Illustrating Cities series. In the first series he uses the metaphor of mountains to manipulate their shapes and move them from their motionless image. In the second series, he instead offers a snapshot of vibrant New York City. He chose this subject for the tragedy that touched the city and the magnificence New York expresses, to show how the lives of men and their systems are superseded: it is from the rubble that reconstruction is possible.

Recurring themes

Kuert continues to develop his message as the media he uses constantly evolve. The thread of Ariadne that guides this research is the eternal becoming, in a constant succession of the apparent dichotomy between destruction and rebirth, where the former implies the latter. The idea of circular time is always eternally present in Kuert’s characters, treated as mythical figures in a sacred space in the constant search for an explanation or a reason that goes beyond the everyday human experience.

Destruction and rebirth

Kuert’s works and their display engender constant oscillation between opposites through the media he uses and the issues he represents.

In his words: Working digitally is a kind of philosophy for me. It means creating with the binary language of 0 and 1. Two complementary values that may be interpreted in multiple ways like‘ on and off’, ‘yes and no’, but also ‘yin and yang’, ‘to be or not to be’, Isis and Osiris and so on.

Kuert views himself as an artist of the "sublime". In his poetry he always plays with concepts and their opposites: the carnality of his figures and their symbolic developments, the digital medium and the picturesque image, the destruction of his own images to seek a new meaning yet again, and the representation of pain to evoke hope.

Time

Early in his career, the artist related his stories to one man, but a person has a beginning and an end in a defined space-time. In a second step, the narrative was condensed in an instant through overlapping layers that produce a single image expressing all the contents. Lastly, Kuert tells the stories not of individual lives that are followed on and off, but of humankind.

Epic is always equal to itself, like the sea. It always has the same movements, the same repetitions. The narrative form demands that there be a beginning and an end, but this is fictional. There are numerous people on Earth, and each has a beginning and an end, just as the waves forming the sea repeat themselves, and this intrigues me. I very much like the idea of a repetition that is always different, just as no two waves are alike.

The characters are then united and dematerialized; refined through revisions, they become symbols. Kuert’s ultimate goal is to elevate humans by appealing to their inner selves, astonishing and leaving a sense of regeneration, conveying the feeling that all of time lies in just one moment.

Myth

Myth is a sacred narrative form through poetic or philosophical allegories of the origins of the world before written history. Kuert has often used this theme in the titles of his works, evoking existing myths or building his own. The time of his subjects is never defined, but is eternally present and cyclical, the theme of repetition linked to oral tradition is the story that is often repeated with slight variations; he uses them to express religious or moral needs and encodes a belief. Myth becomes a vital element of human civilization and an active force built up over time. His works are inspired by spatial form in the same way.

Humankind

Kuert’s work focuses on human emotions and existential questions. After conducting his early aesthetic research through experimental films, he extended its means of expression to the visual arts, including photography, video art, the performing arts, music, writing, and digital art. His evocative and often provocative works are characterized by the fact that they are an integral part of the evolution of different artistic disciplines that collaborate with each other. His art powerfully distances itself from pure formalism to create a strong emotional impact, aiming to astonish people through his images in order to stir their imagination and beckon them to contemplate and seek a sense of wonder. His studio is at the headquarters of dust&scratches, an incubator of ideas that offers a space where participants can design and develop new and original points of view with every artistic medium.

Selected exhibitions

Publications

Selected filmography

Director