«Sonja Feldmeier transfers the process of expulsion frequently cited in times of global migration movements to her pictorial process. She ‹evacuated› the human figures from 24 photographs, all of which were taken from reports on the Iraq war. ‹Recovery of a dying journalist by US soldiers›; ‹Antiwar demonstration in Point Reyes, California›; ‹Iraqi soldiers surrender to US troops›: While the captions stick to the occasion of the photograph, digital retouching adds mysterious, even painterly blurs to the landscape details. The fact that the original Lambda prints are available as a magazine for CHF 10.00 is programmatic. It takes them back to the first place of their reception and once again sharpens the shift in content.» (Isabel Zürcher) 

«The question of up to what point photographs are testimonies to the reality they depict, and from what point on they become a reflection of subjective opinions on this reality, is not easy to answer. What is indisputable, however, is that the manner of publication plays a decisive role in their reception. Layout, captions and commentaries stage events and manipulate the knowledge conveyed about the depicted contexts - something that was publicly demonstrated for the first time and with astonishing brazenness during the Iraq war by means of the reporters ‹embedded› in the troops. The spectacle presented is usually seen as journalism, although the point of spectacle itself is to distract from reality. (...) 

Abstraction through extraction - this is how the intervention that Sonja Feldmeier performs on the actuality images might be reduced to a short formula. (...) The emptied backdrops of the images in Evacuatedappeal to our horror vacui; we project our idea of the annotated events into the images and are confronted with the fact that no one can relieve us of the responsibility for our own ideas. In return, our own access to the exploration of the prefabricated product that has been sold to us as reality opens up. We are still presented with a prepared image, but one that opens up the possibility of new insights.» (Pierre-André Lienhard)

Exhibitions
2001 Sammlungspräsentation, Museum für Kommunikation, Bern
2006 Evacuated, Seifenfabrik, Basel 
2006 Dark Angel, Galerie Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden 
2005 Feedback, o.T. Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Luzern

A series Evacuated is in the collection of the Museum of Communication Bern.