Curriculum Vitae
«Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena in Zimoun’s minimalist constructions effortlessly reverberates.» Laura Blereau

Zimoun lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. His work has been presented internationally, including exhibitions at the Art Museum Nantes, France; Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art MAC Santiago de Chile; Nam June Paik Art Museum Seoul, Republic of Korea; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; Art Museum Reina Sofia Madrid, Spain; National Art Museum Beijing, China; Knockdown Center NYC, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Republic of Korea; Mumbai City Museum, India; Lilanz Art Museum Jinjiang, China; LAC Museum Lugano, Switzerland; Seoul Museum of Art, Republic of Korea; Museum MIS São Paulo, Brasil; Muxin Art Museum Wuzhen, China; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Le Centquatre Paris, France; Kuandu Museum Taipei, Taiwan; Museum of Fine Arts MBAL, Switzerland; Tinguely Museum Basel, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Blackburn Museum, United Kingdom; Museum Collection Lambert Avignon, France; Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia EKKM; Figge Art Museum Davenport, USA; Museum of Fine Arts Thun, Switzerland; BIAN Biennale Montreal, Canada; Contemporary Art Museum MNAC, Bucharest, Romania; Beal Art Center Los Angeles, USA; Ringling Museum of Art Florida, USA; Borusan Contemporary Istanbul, Turkey; The Museum Kitchener, Canada; Exploratorium Museum San Francisco, USA; NYUAD Arts Gallery Abu Dhabi; Museum of Fine Arts Lugano, Switzerland; among others.

Zimoun is best known for his installative, generally site-specific, immersive works, mostly based on recycled materials. He employs mechanical principles of rotation and oscillation to put materials into motion and thus produce sounds. For this he principally uses simple materials from everyday life and industrial usage, such as cardboard, DC motors, cables, welding wire, wooden spars or ventilators. For his works Zimoun develops small apparatuses which, despite their fundamental simplicity, generate a tonal and visual complexity once activated – particularly when a large number of such mechanical contraptions, generally hundreds of them, are united and orchestrated in installations and sculptures.

Zimoun’s works continually embrace oppositional positions, such as the principles of order and chaos. Works may be arranged in a geometrical pattern or ordered and installed according to a system, yet they behave chaotically and act – within a carefully prepared framework of possibilities – in an uncontrolled manner as soon as they are mechanically activated. As if in a clinical study, the pattern and the systematic approach enable an overview, so that the chaos generated by the mechanical process can be better analysed. Mass and individuality also belong among these oppositional positions. The artist often employs a large number of identical elements, but each element develops its own individuality and unique nature through the dynamic interplay of mechanism, rotation and material. The mechanical elements, prepared by hand in the studio, which have a consistently reduced, minimalistic form, function and aesthetic, possess only apparent precision, because the manual production creates divergence from the ideal treatment of the material, allowing imprecisions that emphasise the emerging individual behaviour of the materials, enable it or indeed provoke it.

When naming his works Zimoun consistently follows the principle of listing the materials used one after another. With this he brings materials to the fore; in addition, the titles signal the ‘prepared’ mechanism, indicating the connection to intentionally tonally manipulated musical instruments. His works are often defined using the term of sound architectures, based on the principles of Minimal Music, to which he brings a visual aspect while insisting on a simple, reduced design mostly without embellishment or additional colour.

Although Zimoun conceives of his installations as compositions in a musical sense, he does not actively intervene in the development of their sound. He does not direct the mechanical systems implemented either in an analogue manner or digitally, via a microcontroller or a computer, instead merely activating them by turning on or off their electricity supply. He sees the moment of activation and the dynamic of the materials themselves as a sculptural and performative approach and names the principle behind these works ‘primitive complexity’.

In addition to his installative compositions, Zimoun also develops purely acoustic works. Although the two genres – visual, un-controlled, accidental compositions and musical compositions for sound recording and performance that are laboriously constructed in the studio – may seem quite different at first, both emerge from the artist’s interest in creating spaces and acoustic states which are composed of microscopically small sounds and noises. Zimoun’s recordings are often, like the performative concert arrangements, conceived of for multi-channel sound systems. Through the implementation of multiple loudspeakers, listeners are placed within a three-dimensional sonic architecture which cannot be discovered visually, but only acoustically. Zimoun also works on recordings with other artists from music and the visual arts. Many of these recordings have been released by the Leerraum label, which he founded in 2003 together with graphic designer Marc Beekhuis and which is focussing on reductive concepts.

Text by Ulf Kallscheidt. Translation by Aoife Rosenmeyer. Sikart Lexicon.

297 prepared dc-motors, 1247m rope, wooden sticks 19cm, cardboard boxes 10×10×10 cm, 2019
Motors, rope, wood, cardboard, power supplies.
Dimensions: variable.
Installation view: Museum of Contemporary Art MAC Santiago de Chile.
Photography by Zimoun ©