Women and their cities

During her three-decade career in the art world, Gfeller has explored distant landscapes and cultures, drawing inspiration from her travels.

In 2016, she started a project focusing on the role of women in Chinese megacities. This led to a major exhibition in 2018 at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou. Gfeller says the positive response from a wide audience motivated her to continue the project in other cities.

"My focus is on the intersection between Chinese women and the megacities in which they live. In each city, I met around 10 women of various professional backgrounds to talk in depth before taking photos and filming them," she says.

Gfeller captures the women in both urban and natural settings. She takes photos, films them, and records their conversations as they walk.

"Each took me to places where they have childhood memories, or where their present life takes them every day. This personal link created a special atmosphere. With my camera, I tried to capture their thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, living presences and fantasies," she says.

In her photos and videos, viewers often encounter women gazing thoughtfully at the city, shot from behind. Gfeller's camera contemplates the women as they in turn contemplate the cityscape.

"I like to meet the inhabitants and confront their experiences with my own artistic vision," she says. "I'm trying to find beauty and transform anonymity and loneliness into something joyful."

Gfeller's objective is not rooted in documentary reporting. Instead, she seeks inspiration from observed reality and reinterprets it through an artistic vision that is reconstructed and occasionally transformed into fiction.

"I want their stories to be interpreted in a poetic, sensory manner in a play of fixed images and images in movement, urban noise, natural sounds, voices and the intermingling of words and silence."