Author Description

Much like his photographs, the video work of Swiss Artist Stephan Banz deals with the seemingly unspectacular reality of his family life and everyday environment. His tapes feature his two children, himself, or his rabid neighbor as protagonists. The children's room, the stairwell of his own apartment, a forest nearby, the lake-Banz discovers the strange and alien at the heart of his familiar world. At a time when documentary soaps and their trademark dissolution of the boundaries between the private and the public have become standard television fare, Banz is trying to look beyond titillating sensationalism and trivial psychological truisms in order to accomplish a constructive intermingling of the social and the individual. His video stills are glimpses of quotidian fairy tales-eerie, playful and humorous.