Olga Titus

Candy Crush

March 5 – April 23 2017

Olga Titus (b.1977, lives and works in Winterthur) plays with varying forms of expression and diverse cultural codes using video, animation, collage and photography. She composes colourful photo-collages digitally animating and transforming them into a series of symbolist narratives. Figures taken from Indian miniature painting meet with Chinese paper-cuts amid folkloristic scenery; imagery from a contemporary fitness centre is mixed with family portraits lifted from social media platforms using the aesthetics of popular simplistic video games. The artist plays with these diverse settings and characters, juggling their corresponding conventions of representation and self-display.
As the daughter of a Swiss mother and Malayan/Indian father, Titus' family background has sharpened her understanding for cultural and national stereotypes. Referencing the often sentimental films of Bollywood cinema, she uses them as a blueprint for self-dramatisation within her own work. Titus also parodies the innuendo omnipresent in western commercial campaigns; as in her video Das Prisma, where she is seen licking an ice cream with such excessive tongue acrobatics and fluttering of the eyelashes that the scene reaches the ridiculous.
The exhibition Candy Crush at Kunsthalle Winterthur showcases a selection of several new video works, wall objects and two zoetropes. In the main hall, a so-called Ames room is built, where due to the distortion of perspective, Titus' characteristic visual language will here unfold into a third dimension, further puzzling the visitor's perception.

Joëlle Menzi