Catchup Catsup Ketchup
30. September – 01. October 2017
Group exhibition with Lena Bergendahl, Kah Bee Chow, Max Ockborn and
Jiajia Zhang, Stef Kamaris and Francis Patrick Brady
When I flew in to Switzerland by myself at the age of six with a doggie cardboard around my neck (with my name and the address where my parents lived on it),
I was in between two homes (or no, three) – the one of my one grandmother, the other grandparents and my parents, who became sort of strangers over their two year absence. In China, I had drawn my mum as a sassy vampire demon queen, but on pictures she was more channeling diana ross (the hair). Then, my parents had the great idea of reducing my ‘otherness’ at school and in life (wearing a pink panther pyjama to school got me the final alien status) by introducing another set of parents: The godparents. I had never heard anything about Jesus, so it was more in the sense of ‘an extra set of’.. all the other kids had godparents.
My godmother is an extremely warm hearted Italian woman who loved Benetton and Opera, but both the preppy shirts and Don Giovanni left me bit half hearted
A couple years ago, after I forgot a meeting and showed up way too late, she called me a ’Treulose Tomate’, an infidel tomato. I always ate tomatoes with sugar as a child but the infidel one was bit sour and the one in the bloody mary hot’n’spicy.
-Jiajia Zhang
* catchup, catsup and ketchup is the third iteration of the Circle series with Lena Bergendahl, Kah Bee Chow, Max Ockborn and Jiajia Zhang – with invited artists Stef Kamaris and Francis Patrick Brady for this cycle. The building Alta is housed in was once a ketchup factory – we hope to make much mischief with this as possible 🙂 Jiajia and Stef travelled from Switzerland and Greece to take part in a week-long workshop at Alta with the rest of the crew. A public presentation took place at the end of the week during Malmö Gallery Night 2017.
With support from IASPIS
