The highly rated multi-media artist, Hannah Wienburger, is a known traveller and investigator. She explores people and places and many diverse countries. In Zurich, she studied for seven years: photography, painting, music, performance, film, new media and videos. As a teenager with a Super-8 camera, she searched for and photographed communities, thus establishing the foundations for her future development. Early performance art in Milan was followed by her first solo show in Basel. Working with friends or alone, Wienburger uses sounds – recorded electronic pieces, singing voice, backdrops and loops – that have been described as ‘sweet and hypnotic.’

For four years, Wienburger worked with video to emulate and ignite the senses and the imagination, spaces and memories. She creates choreographed sounds like avant-garde songs or ‘sound poems.’ According to the artist, these are ‘mental landscapes’ rather than dreams.

In Basel, Wienburger was given a solo exhibition to inaugurate Freymond-Guth’s new gallery, which involved months of construction. The attention to architectural detail is in character with her tireless curiosity and absorption in minutiae. Darkened rooms with screens supporting moving and still imagery: there were visual and invisible objects as well as black speakers for sound backdrops and small box lights resembling the eyes of nocturnal primates. Video storytelling occupies rooms with audio installations: visions of fish in tanks, flowers, puppets and constantly flowing sounds. From her wired, acoustic curtains emerges rhythmic music suggesting early Brian Eno. Ambient sounds contrast with recorded street voices.

To paraphrase Weinberger; she resists art that is only about materials. Rather, the artist prefers not to acknowledge a division between art and life, except that ‘Art’ – the exhibition of her work – enables her to ‘play with unusual strategies within and at the boundaries of codified sensuality’.

Hannah Wienburger stands apart with her audio-visual landscapes. A form of osmosis, they spread across genres. The thrilling sixteenchannel video exhibit at Freymond-Guth embodies Wienburger’s mantra: ‘I can work while I play’.