A courtroom is one of those places where language does not merely describe but can have consequences: statements are recorded, jurisdictions established, responsibility examined. In Gabriela Löffel’s new video work “for the record”, just such a trial is staged – against a Swiss bank that does not exist. The case is invented; the economic and political questions it raises are not.
The work is the centrepiece of Löffel’s exhibition “Grammatik der Lücken” (Grammar of Gaps), which opens on 15 November 2026 at Kunsthalle Appenzell. It takes the artist into territory that has shaped her audiovisual practice for years: how is power mediated through images, spaces, language and technical systems? And what can be discerned when an artwork does not claim simply to uncover a hidden truth, but instead examines the conditions of storytelling itself?
A trial as an artistic method
According to the exhibition information, Löffel collaborated with women journalists and lawyers, universities and students in Lebanon on “for the record”. Its starting point is research into the collapse of the Lebanese banking system and possible connections to the Swiss financial sector. The video work also draws on the case of former Lebanese central bank governor Riad Salamé. In Beirut, a fictional legal case was staged and filmed as a mock trial with law students. At its centre is the invented Swiss Trust Bank and the question of its possible share of responsibility for the banking system’s collapse.
This construction should not be confused with actual legal proceedings. Nor is it evidence of any actual misconduct by a real Swiss bank. Rather, fiction creates an experimental framework: it can give concrete form to relationships, roles and institutional processes without itself determining guilt or liability. This is precisely where the productive tension – and the limit – of the artistic method lies. A trial on video can sharpen questions and organise perspectives; legal argument follows different rules and requires verifiable evidence.
What becomes visible – and what remains unresolved
The exhibition places Löffel’s new work in relation to earlier works spanning some two decades. “Setting” (2011) explores the staging of war and its audiovisual mediation. The seven-part photographic work “Unseen” (2016) turns its attention to trade fair stands and the organisation of visibility within the world of global finance. In “Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity” (2023–2024), specialists reconstruct hard-to-understand passages from an audio recording of an offshore finance conference. These works thus examine not only what is said or shown, but also who can speak, what remains audible and which spaces shape statements.
Löffel’s method can be understood as working in the spaces between: between documentation and staging, between a voice and its translation, between what an image shows and what lies outside it. The exhibition title “Grammatik der Lücken” fits this interest. Here, gaps are not merely missing information that could be filled by an unequivocal explanation. They can point to the limits of perception and to power relations: to what is made visible within a system – and to what its representation leaves out.
Fiction does not absolve
With a subject such as financial power, staging carries a twofold risk. It could turn a complex situation into a comprehensible but misleadingly self-contained story. Or, by explicitly invoking fiction, it could shed all responsibility for the real-world references it uses. The method becomes interesting where it does not conceal this tension: the invented bank makes it possible to put the case on trial, but it replaces neither research nor legal scrutiny.
The Kunsthalle describes Löffel’s works as investigations into how realities are staged and become legible from different perspectives. This is a claim to perception, not to a verdict. What the new installation makes of the spaces, voices and recordings of the filmed trial will only become clear in Appenzell. The exhibition thus invites a question that reaches beyond the individual case: how can political and economic connections be represented without mistaking representation for proof?
Original reviewed by the editors · 3 November 2026
