Chambre Sauvage

Chambre Sauvage collects the staged photographic tableaux of Swiss photographer Nadin Maria Rüfenacht (b. 1980), where taxidermied animals, costumed figures, and painted stage flats combine into theatrical, faintly unsettling still lifes.

Published by Lubok Verlag, Leipzig, in 2013 on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Galerie Kleindienst, the hardcover catalog reproduces 53 images in four-color offset, designed by Toni Schönbuchner. Rüfenacht builds her scenes from inherited props (furniture, tools, and tableware once belonging to a woman named Johanna), reconstructing an imagined circus of hybrid creatures the volume pairs the photographs with texts by theater director Sebastian Hartmann and critic Markus Stegmann.

Rüfenacht trained under Timm Rautert at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, earning her photography diploma in 2005 and completing Meisterschüler studies there in 2008. She lives and works in Leipzig (sharing a studio with her husband, painter Tilo Baumgärtel, at the Leipzig Cotton Mill) and in her native Grosshöchstetten and Bern she is represented by Galerie Kleindienst. Her photography returns to the friction between the organic and the artificial.