Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza and Daniel Hauser live and work in Zurich, Switzerland.

Their works and projects trade under the name RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), whereby the “co” stands for partners who change according to the project. Many exhibition projects, but also lectures and workshops, take the artists, among others, to institutions like Shedhalle Zürich (1990 / 2003 / 2004 / 2006), Steirischer Herbst, Graz (1991), Kunsthalle Basel (1992), Künstlerhaus Berlin (1993 / 2003), Winnipeg Art Gallery (1993), Capp Street Project San Francisco (1994), Kunsthalle Bern (1999), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH/USA (1999), Venice Architecture Biennial, Swiss Pavillion (2000), Fondazione Michelangelo Pisoletto, Biella (2002), Contemporary Art Center CCA, Kiev (2002), Dunkers Culture Center Helsingborg (2003), UN-Headquarter New York (2003), Kunsthaus Centre Pasquart (2005) Kunstraum Innsbruck (2006) and Ortstermine 2006, City of Munich (2006).

In its work, RELAX occupies an artistic position that since the 1980s has sought out in-between spaces, infiltrated them, posed irksome questions as to economic connections and their cultural impact and examined social links and patterns. The research the artists instigated, their intense coming-to-grips with societal, political and social questions, their stand vis-à-vis the art system per se and the prevailing theoretical discourses are all transformed into photography, installations, drawings, video works and performances. It is the site as the place of concrete realization, but above all also as the mental category, the mirror of a social (activity) space, the territory for different interactions and interventions that, in the 1990s, became a central aspect of RELAX’s art. The artists arrive for an exhibition, for projects in a public place, without any predetermined ideas or intentions, as it were; they do not bring along finished works already conceived and produced, but develop their works on the spot, mostly with the assistance of residents or colleagues.