On the occasion of the prestigious Manor Art Prize 2004, video and installation artist Tatjana Marusic (born in 1971 in Croatia, she grew up in Schaffhausen, and now lives and works in Lucerne and Menziken) has received her first opportunity to hold a solo show in a museum.

Tatjana Marusic is rightly considered one of the most convincing of the young generation of Swiss artists. A graduate of the Lucerne College of Art and Design (1994-8), she has for some time now caught the eye with innovative video concepts screened in group shows and smaller solo shows at a regional and national level. An impressive 3-channel video piece entitled a woman under the influence, which she first showed at the Annual Exhibition of Artists in Central Switzerland at the Lucerne Museum of Art in 2002, impressed not only the Confederate Art Commission, which awarded her a Swiss Art Award 2003. It led, among other things, to her also winning both the Namic Art Prize for New Media and the Viper Prize for the International Selection 2003. Additional honors were accorded here in 2002 in the form of a contribution by the Canton of Lucerne to the intercultural project Berne-Basel-Gibraltar, followed of course by the Manor Art Prize 2004, and in June 2004 she was the proud recipient of a further Swiss Art Award.

What becomes clear in her five newly created video installations is just how far the content of the pieces is meshed with their form. Marusic focuses on the way an image is composed of individual pixels and how they can be manipulated, and in so doing transforms the found imagery (for example, in the memory of a landscape) of Winnetou movies to engender an explosive “gestural and painterly” abstract composition of colors and shapes. In other pieces, the formal treatment of the potential afforded by digital images corresponds to the structure or reconstruction of memory. Marusic shows great sensitivity in her incorporation of tangible and fleeting fragments of memory: family photos, atmospheric images, stories, sounds, songs. She thus creates a woven mnemonic fabric that leads back to her roots in the Balkans. And yet the mood conveyed by the works triggers far more in the viewer than simply empathy with the artist’s biography and feelings. With their technical precision and compositional care, the videos combine an irritating sense of inner rupture with quite stunning beauty.