TWISTED SISTERS: Reimaging Urban Portraiture
Co-curated with Alexandra Blättler. Traveling exhibition.
Museum Bärengasse, Zurich, Switzerland. July - October 2013
San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: City Hall. October 2013 - January 2014
Artist: San Francisco: Tammy Rae Carland, John Chiara, Pablo Guardiola, Sanaz Mazinani, Lindsey White Zürich: Bianca Brunner, Dominic Hodel, Georg Gatsas, Thomas Julier, Marianne Müller, Cat Tuong Nguyen, Thomas Sauter, Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier, Veronika Spierenburg
TWISTED SISTERS: Reimagining Urban Portraiture is a traveling exhibition featuring artists from the Bay Area and Zurich, curated by SFAC Galleries Director Meg Shiffler and Zürich-based independent curator Alexandra Blättler. Serving as the centerpiece of the Sister City Exchange 2013: San Francisco - Zurich, supported by the respective municipal governments and Sister City Committees, the exhibition interrogates assumptions about urban life through photography. The curators invited conceptual photographers from each city to produce new works that rethink and reimagine what a city portrait can be. The resulting collection of over 80 images challenges conventional representations of San Francisco and Zurich, revealing hidden layers of social, cultural, and architectural complexity.
The artists approached the project with deep engagement in their respective urban environments, creating works that reveal private, overlooked, or altered realities. Some images expose concealed histories or question the sanitized narratives often associated with iconic cityscapes, while others explore intimate domestic or communal spaces that reveal the personal lives embedded within urban fabric. By twisting familiar views and inserting unexpected perspectives, the exhibition reframes the viewer’s understanding of both cities, offering a visual dialogue that is at once critical, playful, and incisive. Twisted Sisters demonstrates how portraiture—of people, places, and urban atmospheres—can become a lens for examining identity, memory, and the complex social dynamics of contemporary cities.