Regula Tschumi
»My various activities revolve around the intersection of art and art education. The limits of science and art and theory and practice largely vanish in my work. I collaborate with artists and artisans to develop sculptures and paintings for museums and private customers, as well as personal art projects for myself. Through such collaboration, I have been able to create innovative art works, some of which have been shown in museum exhibitions and even kept in museum collections.«
»Drawing and sculpture have also been important for me in the context of my ethnographic research in Africa, especially in Ghana where I still spend several months every year. Particularly the drawings of the carpenter and artist Ataa Oko have shown me a lot about the religious beliefs and the culture of the Ga people in Southern Ghana. In my role as an art and culture mediator, it is important that the art works I provide to exhibitions and art collectors are linked with Ghanaian or more general with African traditions, thereby giving western art viewers a glimpse of the rich African cultures.«
Regula Tschumi is a freelance scholar, art mediator and photographer based in Berne, Switzerland. She worked until 2002 for the Swiss national airline Swissair. From 1996 to 2003, while still working at the airline, she studied social anthropology, art history and religious studies in Berne.
2013 she received a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Basel with her research about the figurative palanquins and coffins in Ghana. In connection with her studies, she spent six months in Zanzibar (East Africa) and more than five years doing field work in Ghana (West Africa).
Regula Tschumi has published a number of articles and photographs in exhibition catalogues and scholarly journals, as well as two books about the figurative coffins and palanquins of the Ga in Ghana.
She participated in several art exhibitions and art projects as a co-curator, consultant and as a photographer, including ones at the Art Museum in Berne, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and at the Musée d’ethnographie in Neuchâtel.
