Jannik Giger at Video Ex Zurich

Breathe in. This is the invitation, or warning, Jannik Giger gives as we enter his suite of works: Mixtape, Sunday Lovers, Blind Audition and Lamento – screened together at Video Ex Zurich 2025 in collaboration with Video Window. Breathing out equates to a release or realisation of our human frailties exposed in his study of the singer as conduit, communicator, hostage and lover. Like a cosmologist, Giger deftly pulls apart the physicality and emotional range of the singer to explore the mysteries and strangeness of voice, much like a black hole would. Sound, voice and song are constants, separated in various ways across Giger’s multiverses from the labour of the body. Through the curtain interstice, we peek at bodies expanded, contorted, crushed, disfigured and hollowed out. Each singers’ spirit is iteratively trapped. They are forced to reflect upon their authenticity while belting-out megaphonic truths that originate elsewhere.

In Mixtape, we are dropped into an eerie belt of sound waves with the likes of Mariah Carey, Philippe Jaroussky, Chet Baker, Justin Bieber and Maria Callas. These portraits are restless studies, topped and tailed by the goddesses of song, Mariah and Maria. Staccato frames inch in their progression, rubbed back and forth so we can take in these studies as a collection of taxidermal relics. I’m reminded of Billie Whitelaw’s lips in Beckett’s Not I (1972): a brightly lit mouth speaking rapidly, indecipherably and the actress controlled by the parameters of just being a talking mouth suspended in the nothing. Giger draws us with even more control into the movement of these icons who, like animals, shake their heads to throw out the voice that seems stuck like a fur ball. It is a voice not really theirs; they channel it as mediums. The voices are slowed and scrunched like their furrowed brows. Faces stretched by Goyaesque elongations weighted by a jaw enabling the mouth to be perfectly round. Bieber’s youthful shape is the least open, while Callas preserves the ideal, swallowing us whole. Screeches at high pitch are taut and nervy, but not irritating. We float like cosmonauts on an umbilical thread precariously connected to our humanness. 

The apogee of Giger’s forensics is struck in Blind Audition. This is his most psychological piece, heavily textured in its set-design, sound and ideas. Voice takes on baryonic form as music. Music in all its classical glory. Breathe in, breathe out – into and out of the folds of her (Noëlle-Anne Darbellay’s) concertina skirt as crests and troughs are drawn sharply against the drapery. A curtain separates fears and foibles («am I good enough?») from the perfection of “singing for” in a room honouring small alabaster effigies of male composers.

We are sucked backstage into a body under siege. The camera spirals then plummets to capture sections of calves (the ballet stage leg), hands, face, neck, iris, eye and inside the throat. She throws the voice like a ventriloquist in a painful possession, now twice removed, establishing a synching motif, repeated with narrative form in Lamento. Trapped, trained and brainwashed. It is an obsession, necessary but yearning for contingency: could it not be any other way? We see her bounce between an “off-stage” and “on-stage” existence. It is a fascination of Giger’s that we find blurred with metatheatrical transparency in Lamento. He highlights that yawning gap between being seen and unseen, where one gathers themselves to be authentic while giving themselves inauthentically: «It’s like you have real feelings. You just have no idea how to make them honest.» The edits in Audition shuffle frenetic, fractured images. Incongruent objects litter the space for her to step, crawl and roll through; it’s a universe falling apart, a retaliatory action against a Wagnerian Gospel.

While Audition is shaken in its deconstructed way, we get a gentle stir with Sunday Lovers. this is Arguably Giger’s most absurd piece. It seems that we’ve arrived at the eye (the calm centre) of the storm, or blackhole – to keep the associations rolling. No rectilinear space or time. Two figures are set in a grey space (Jetpack Bellerive). They assume positions, poses and postures, inverted, horizontal, bent and curling into the other. Sometimes as bipeds, other times quadrupeds: he groans episodically like a male deer in a bizarre mating ritual; she oscillates between nonchalance and pseudo-seduction. The violin and horn are tinkered and toyed with as extensions and expressions of this contrived relation. There is no tapping into voice or lip-syncing of well-known singers, but something more fundamental. We witness the channelling of sound and phoneme at its purest. Gurgling, hooting and snorting, bodies bind, hold and twist in tableaus with a hint of the heroic: are they heralding the end of their relationship, the end of music, or just the end of the week?

As we enter the living room of Lamento, the theme of “back-stage” takes on new structure and meaning. The arrangement of the decor is as meticulous and haunting as a David Lynch set (Demian Wohler). The architecture of each room, separated by a door to keep it out or in, just like a breath, goes beyond any visually aesthetic importance. The rooms become spacetime containers that amplify the voice now captured with precise, mimetic syncing in the performers’ lips and full body movements (Llewelynn Reichmann & Thorbjörn Björnsson). They narrate their/or any relationship through a medley of lines from familiar love songs. The camera follows their intimate circulation from room to room in a trimmed back, intrusive single-shot. Edits “A—B” consistently between the couple. Time and history are compressed. Repetition of lines «I will always love you», «I will love you all» has the exhausted effect of draining any meaning. We stare into the infinite, a vanishing point. It is a sober self-reflection that has us peak with the “power of love” in a pendulum of metal stalactites, buoyed by Celine but left deposited on the couch with our lovers – together yet forever alone.  

Giger and collaborators have created a mesmerising suite of video works that question the ontology of sound, voice and music. They further raise the idea of an estranged relationship between the singer and their song, the musician and their music, and the performer and their performance. Giger’s study is not self-obsessed, but curious and compelling. His universes offer a unique, if not disturbing, glimpse into these mysterious relations.