Christoph Draeger

Christoph Draeger was born in 1965 in Switzerland and currently lives and works in Umeå, Sweden where he is professor at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, and in Brooklyn, NY. He studied art at Ecole National Superieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels, Belgium (1990-1991) and at the School of Visual Arts in Lucerne, Switzerland (1986-1990). In 1996/1997 he was the Swiss artist-in-residence at the P.S.1 international studio program in New York, and in 2005/2006, he was the Landis & Gyr Stiftung artist-in-residence in London.

Draeger’s body of work takes form in installation, video, and photo-based media to explore issues pertaining to disaster and media-saturated culture. His works are based on historical events as well as apocalyptic scenes that the artist has created in his studio. He builds and photographs model landscapes that symbolize natural and man-made disasters. He’s also using press images of catastrophe for the production of large scale jigsaw puzzles for the acclaimed series “The Most Beautiful Disasters In the World”, many of which can be found in private and in museum collections. His videos often borrow from news footage, Hollywood movies and amateur video, which are then edited together into a contrived allegory for real catastrophic events. Draeger’s work parallels the objectivity found in news documentation of such events with the exploitative forces that manipulate the audience’s perception of that news.