There's something uncanny about the new exhibition space at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. It's as if a downstairs wall has drawn apart and a small, dark chamber revealed itself as having lurked behind the surface for all these years. Steal through the chink of an entrance and you're arrested by a grainy image, playing like a shadow on the wall ahead. A masked woman closes in on the lens, retreats again, dancing in slow motion. Behind her, scarcely discernible, a child sleeps, oblivious to her posturing. To the rear of the tiny gallery, a solitary piece of jewellery stands encased like an ancient, fragile icon, the diamond tips on its delicate gold and enamel tendrils like tiny eyes on serpents' heads.
Welcome to The Paradise, the exhibition in the new Gallery 2, which will see well-known artists present their ideas of utopia over coming months. It kicked off last week with a return visit from two Swiss artists, the photographer and film maker Annelies Strba and her husband, the jewellery maker Bernhard Schobinger, who came to Dublin with a show at the DHG two-and-a-half years ago.
Strba's contribution is An VII, a seven-minute film shot in a Venice hotel bedroom and featuring her eldest daughter, Sonja. The boy who sleeps behind her is her son, Samuel-Maria, last sighted in the closing images of Shades Of Time, her December 1998 installation, as a grinning toddler with a froth of his mother's ice-blond hair. Strba has not worked in photography since; film is now her medium, offering greater scope and freedom. It marks a profound change in her portrait of herself, as a woman and as an artist.
From her early teens, when she worked as an apprentice photographer in her home town of Zug, Strba saw in photography the promise of liberation, the assurance that everyday life could be transformed into something bearable. She tells how she cried every day for three months when sent to her first job in a city office, until her mother relented and allowed her to choose her own path from a careers book.
"In the book, I saw how you can stay in the darkroom," she remembers. "It was for me very magic to do something where you have only white paper and, after, there comes something on the paper."
The transubstantiation-like process of the negative becoming positive fed a craving for the mysterious that had driven the young Strba to unexpected places. "Since I was a little child, I was always in the church alone, every day, though I was not Catholic," she says. "I wanted always something special."
"Marriage and motherhood placed demands on her time and energy, and Strba felt restrained from developing her photography in a consciously artistic direction. All the time, though, what seemed a mere pastime was being cultivated into an art form. Snapshots of her daughters Sonja and Linda in the simplest situations of childhood and adolescence seemed to sound out mythical resonances, to tell stories from a universal memory. Strba was unearthing something meaningful.
"To me, it's very important to go back to my roots," she explains. "I go into my darkroom, and there I find something from me, my mother,
An VII represents a fundamental change in direction for Strba. While Sonja and Linda continue to populate the landscape of her work, they appear in altered guises. These days, her work is about her. "I begin now in a very different way. I make photos from my daughters, but not as my daughters; now they are my models. I make my feelings in them. I put all of myself into the work."
With its ghostly oscillation and its blank face inviting the reflection of the viewer, An VII captures for Strba the paradise of her new artistic identity. In the figure of her daughter, distorted and discoloured, her gaze blocked out by the hard lines of a mask, her seven-year-old son sleeping behind her, Strba says everything that matters for her now.
If for Strba the hypnotic unwinding of An VIIpoints to an indefinable paradise, for the viewer it can be an unsettling experience. Shades Of Time, too, had its disconcerting undertones; not just the flashes of desolate landscapes, anonymous places, but images of children at their most vulnerable, lost in sleep, limbs strewn and sheets tossed as if in nightmares, clutching each other as if in the face of some danger. But the negative, Strba points out, is always balanced by the positive.
"When we went to Hiroshima, to Auschwitz, I showed not the bad feeling, but the place where it was, the bad happening. In Hiroshima I showed the future; I call the photo Hiroshima, Mon Amour. I show children playing, loving."
At first glance The Heart Sutra On A Gold Bangle, Schobinger's offering for The Paradise, could not appear more different from the work with which it shares a space. Inscribed with a Buddhist sutra, its vines of gold wrapped in leaves of rich green enamel and edged with tiny diamonds, it is solid, tangible, indubitably there, in marked contrast to the ethereal flickering of Strba's blurred imagery. Yet in its delicacy, his bracelet expresses an idea of paradise close to that of his wife. Inspired by the death-bed poem of a medieval Japanese ruler, it expresses a paradise on the border of waking and sleeping.
"The diamonds . And they are on the buds, which are the future life, the potential life." This tension between loss and hope is his paradise, a transient state of suspension. "Mostly what people mean by paradise is eternity," he says. "In Buddhism, paradise is only a station between living and nirvana, like a waiting room. A safe place, for a while."
Doesn't it feel odd for the couple to have strangers peering into For Schobinger, Strba's portrayals of his daughters' most intimate moment are acceptable because they are art. "It's not strange; there has been no other way for us. Always living with the click, click, click."
The Paradise (1) by Annelies Strba and Bernhard Schobinger is at Douglas Hyde Gallery 2 (01-6081116), Dublin, until July 21st.
