Mats Staub

Mats Staub (born in 1972) grew up in Switzerland, in Muri bei Bern, and now lives in Berlin. He studied Theatre Studies, Journalism and Religious Studies in Bern, Fribourg and Berlin, worked as a journalist for a variety of publications and as a dramaturg at the Theater Neumarkt in Zurich, where he began to create his own artistic projects in 2004.

Most of his works are long-term projects and are characterised by his patient and attentive study of people – they deal with life’s fundamental themes in a common context. So, for example, he carried out conversations in fourteen cities with more than three hundred people about what they knew about their grandparents. The continually updated audio installation My Grandparents|Memory Bureau  was presented at a broad range of institutions, including Theater Basel (2008), the Wiener Festwochen (2009) and the Historisches Museum Frankfurt (2012).

For the video installation 21–Memories of Growing Up he created portraits of people from very different generations each recalling their experiences from the year in which they were 21 years old. This installation also grew as it travelled from city to city and was continually presented in new forms, for example at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt (2012), the Museum of Communication Berne (2013), the Adelaide Festival (2018) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2019) and at Ruhrtriennale (2021).

His long-term project Death and Birth in My Life (since 2019) asks about existential experiences. It brings people together to talk to each other about their experiences of death and birth – so far conversations have taken place in cities including Manchester, Kinshasa, Munich, Basel, Bamako and Paris. The work has been presented in theatres and museums (e.g. The Whitworth Manchester, Salzburg Museum, CCS Paris, Spielart Munich) and also, since 2021, in private living rooms.

In 2020 he was awarded a Swiss Theatre Award: “Mats Staub’s artistic projects take us on a journey to the four corners of the globe, inviting us to take time to listen and watch. Without recourse to facile spectacles, Mats Staub has, over the years, developed an exceptionally coherent poetry that gives us portraits of intense humanity. With refined delicacy and meticulous formal rigour, his works explore our most intimate and personal dimension, confronting us with the multi-layered complexity of our times.” (Cristina Galbiati, jury member)

"I felt there was one artistic work at the Ruhrtriennale that connected to humanity — and it wasn’t in a theater. Over the past decade, the Swiss artist Mats Staub has conducted hundreds of interviews with individuals of various ages and backgrounds for 21 — Memories of Growing Up, which has been installed in a turbine hall in Bochum. Spread over 50 different stations, the video interviews provide varied reflections on maturity, independence and happiness. The project feels like an archive of human strivings and the possibility for rebirth."
The New York Times, 27.08.2021

"Listening Faces"
Conversation with Judith Gerstenberg about the Works at the Ruhrtriennale, 26.05.2021

"I spent four hours in the exhibition, and I could have spent four more, it’s addictive."
The Guardian, 12.03.2018

"Mats Staub has turned an aptitude for human connection into a gentle yet highly revelatory artwork."
CityMag Adelaide, 15.02.2018

"This is the transcendent aspect of the project '21': it breaks the boundaries of race, class and culture and it allows people who have grown up in disparate parts of the world and sometimes in vastly different circumstances to feel a deep connection with another human being."
Passages, Nr 64

"Astonishing moments of direct emotion conveyed through facial expressions: with his numerous projects Mats Staub is developing a form of artistic anthropology that science cannot achieve. This fabulous work is worth visiting again and again. Definitely."
Der Standard, 18.05.2015