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MixTape

Doing art politically: Thomas Hirschhorn @ the Royal Academy Schools

This week, I was very excited to attended the epically entitled lecture ‘Doing art politically’ by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. It promised to give insight into the artist’s practice, particularly with regards to his view of the political. “I am only interested in what is really political, the political that implicates: Where do I stand? Where does the other stand? What do I want? What does the other want? The () opinions and forging of the majorities, does not interest, and has never interested me. For I am concerned with making my art politically,” notes Hirschhorn.

According to Hirschhorn, it has to be the goal of the artist to create new meaning, a new world through giving form to his/ her ideas. Hirschhorn’s chosen technique is 2D as well as 3D collage. In order for the artist’s creation to be original one has to go beyond what can be controlled and retain a positive attitude for to do art politically means having to confront and touch upon the negative. It is also essential for the artist, so Hirschhorn, to make a decision, for instance, in terms of material, to defend it and see it through independently of the demands of the art market. Doing art politically ultimately means encountering the world we live in and confronting reality without focusing on the particular. The artist, muses Hirschhorn, has to create a platform, an opening to reach out and connect with the audience.

And this is exactly where the problem lies. Hirschhorn believes that the act of ‘doing art politically’ is about choosing a position, and thereby inviting the audience to take a stand. But what exactly is his position?
He precisely avoids the act of positioning himself by engaging in the postmodern act of appropriation of ‘context–free’ images and text and reassembling them into collages of mutilated bodies, clubbed seals and naked women borrowing the aesthetics and language of protest. By avoiding the particular and throwing a whole clutter of imagery at his audience he manages to escape any positioning through his work, which makes it in essence look like the wet dream of an adolescent bedroom revolutionary!

Some critics have argued that it is too easy and bears an only superficial engagement with his work to simply dismiss it as a sensationalist wankfest of imagery; that, in fact, he feels it is his moral obligation to critique this very “dictatorship of opinion, news and information”by the media – to quote Hirschhorn himself– through an abolition of hierarchy– visually and in terms of material; that, therefore, making his audience feel overwhelmed by the undifferentiated image overload of death, violence and pornography is precisely his point.

I have to admit it is refreshing to hear an artist speak about his work with such passion and conviction in an age where cynicism seems to be the order of the day. His philosophy of the artist as a mythical warrior figure with a mission is almost Beuysian in character, while the title of his lecture conjures up romantic revolutionary associations of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. However, frankly, I fail to discern what Hirschhorn is actually trying to say with his work. And if it is a critique of the terrorism of information in our day and age through using the same old tools of postmodern appropriation, this is hardly original or engaging.

I feel, that Hirschhorn’s work is self–indulgent, egocentric and only exists to justify his personal manifesto, which is fair enough, as some might say. With regards to this however, referring to his act of creation as ‘doing art politically’ is misleading and inappropriate, as in my understanding ‘doing art politically’ entails making work that has heart, passion, soul and vision. And although Hirschhorn, no doubt, seems to be committed to his work and personal philosophy this passion and his actual message remain trapped in the wilderness of his ideology, fail to enter his work and ultimately connect with and engage the viewer on any emotional level.

The phenomenology of pain: Donald Rodney In Retrospect @ Rivington Place

Both overtly and unapologetically political as well as personal Donald Rodney’s body of work is as layered, enriching and significant as ever. However, experiencing his current In Retrospect at Iniva, which marks the decade since his untimely death from sickle cell anemia, I was struggling to keep at bay an underlying sense of pain, suffering and isolation. This indeed spoke volumes of the subtle emotive power of the works on view, all of which were made in the final decade of the artist’s career.

Rodney was born in 1961 in West Bromwich, a suburb of Birmingham, and studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic. In the early eighties he first achieved visibility as part of the Blk Art Group, a small circle of students of Caribbean descent including Eddie Chambers, Claudette Johnson, Marlene Smith and Keith Piper who were re–examining social and historical narratives from a diasporic perspective. During his career, he created a complex body of work, examining and challenging racial stereotypes, particularly through themes of black masculinity and the body.

During the latter part of the eighties, Rodney began to make extensive use of discarded medical x–rays in his work such as Britannia Hospital 3 (1988). However, far from declaring himself a victim of his illness or exploiting the symbolic implications of sickle cell as a ‘black’ disease, Rodney referred to the disease that had taken hold of his body as a metaphor to investigate the ailments of structural and institutional racism, violence and injustice within a wider social and cultural context.

In his Self–Portrait: Black Men, Public Enemy (1990), Rodney assembled five rectangular light–boxes in the shape of a T, each one featuring the portrait of a black man. Two images resemble a police mug–shot, two feature a man handcuffed with his head bowed down, and a final is a bizarre identikit construction of a black man as a mugger or rapist. The men’s eyes are all covered by black rectangles except for the last one to convey a sense of collective stereotypical representation of the black man as the ‘other’, while emphasizing the unwillingness of wider society to perceive him as an individual with his own unique identity.

A continuation of his interrogation of cultural stereotypes associated with blackness is Doublethink (1992), a large–scale installation of sporting trophies assembled on shelves and in a glass cabinet and labeled with all too familiar statements, which Rodney termed “half truths and half lies”. One trophy reads ‘All black men are violent’, another one says ‘Black culture cannot make any important achievements’ while a third one proclaims ‘Black Women are use [sic] to degradation’. In this work, Rodney suggests how black people have come to be imprinted with twisted identities by dominant culture through the media, while at the same time drawing attention to one such stereotype, which is the supposed sporting prowess that simultaneously liberated and trapped black people. The title Doublethink also refers to the resulting sense of double consciousness, of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, which one accepts as true.

One of the most intimate, personal and much documented pieces is My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother (1997), in which Rodney used his own skin recovered from one of his many operations to create a tiny house–like structure the size of his palm held together by pins. A signifier of fragility, transcendence, and belonging but also of pain and the unavoidable death, the miniscule house, much like Psalms (1997), a motorized wheelchair that moves through the gallery space calls forth the artist’s presence in a way that is bodily and real.

A new element in the exhibition and perhaps the most emotive one is a film made by filmmaker John Akomfrah, a friend of Donald Rodney’s. In The Genome Chronicles Akomfrah juxtaposes Super 8 film footage shot by Rodney to document his more and more frequent visits to various hospitals, his visits to gallery openings, as well as his close friends, and partner with his own material inspired by the loss of his mother: sombre and contemplative recordings of the Scottish Isles of White and Mull. Conceived as a poem to his late friend, The Genome Chronicles is accompanied by music that intensifies its experience as a meditation on the fundamental relationship and existentialist paradox between pain and the imagination, between memory and identity, between memorial and remembrance.

As artist and friend Keith Piper said: “The political significance of Rodney’s work should not be underestimated, nor his legacy which continues to inspire younger artists. This exhibition, which reveals the artist as one of the most complex and talented artists of his generation, highlights that Rodney’s premature death was a great loss to the artistic community in this country.”

www.iniva.org
www.rivingtonplace.org

Nicola Dove: Observance @ Dilston Grove

Stepping into the cold and damp darkness of Dilston Grove formerly known as Clare College Mission Church in Southwark Park on a warm and sunny autumn day is like leaving this world and stepping into an alternate reality. As the door slowly closed behind me, complete darkness descended. Staring on the ground in front of me, I waited for my eyes to adjust so I would not suddenly step into the void. After a few minutes, when I finally looked up and decided to step into the belly of the now derelict church, I realized that I was not alone.
Looking back at me from the walls of the church were 54 people from a wide spectrum of faiths. Their backlit long exposure photographic portraits were accompanied by soundscapes, weaving together their chants, prayers, songs and whispers. The echoes of their voices bounced back from the empty building’s walls conjuring up not only their own presence but also the spiritual memory of those who used to frequent the church for mess before it closed its doors in 1966.

Since 2004 photographer Nicola Dove has invited believers from across the world to participate in this project including Buddhists, Sikhs, Sufis, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Pagans, Shamans, amongst others. They were invited into a meditational space to recite a chosen prayer or mantra and photographed, using a cable release, with a 15 second exposure time while looking directly at the camera. This composition, which is reminiscent of the art of icon painting, a practice which follows strict spiritual procedures and visual parameters, locates the figures as dominant and central within the frame and therefore brings them into direct relationship with the viewer.

This relationship is intensified by the sounds of voices weaving in and out of the darkness of the church. Sound is integral to most faiths, with many believing that aligning with sound frequencies can create pathways to spiritual knowledge and enlightenment. For Observance, recordings were made of the prayers and mantras from each sitter. These individual sounds have been layered and woven together creating a single soundtrack that forms the narrative structure of the projection piece. The sounds that accompany the images are held for fifteen seconds each, mirroring the original exposure time.

On experiencing Observance, it becomes clear that these images are more than mere representations of flesh and bone. They seem to vibrate with an energy that conjures up the spirits of those photographed, so that their presence can be clearly felt across time and space in a way that is visceral and real.
What Observance has managed to achieve is not only a direct engagement, a connection between the subject and the viewer. It is also offering a rare insight into the power of art – and faith– in reaching out and bridging differences across culture, religion, race and gender and connecting us on the basis of our common humanity.

Experience Observance at Dilston Grove until 9 November 2008.
www.cafegalleryprojects.org
www.nicoladove.com

What is British Art? A cross–cultural conference at Tate Britain

Well, there is Tracy Emin’s drunk antics on Channel 4 after the Turner Prize awards dinner in 2004; Damian Hirst selling his recent one–man show “Beautiful inside my head forever” at Sotheby’s auction house for a whopping £111m; and, of course, Marc Quinn’s obnoxious life–size gold statue of Kate Moss as “modern day Aphrodite” currently on display at the British Museum.
This is the official story. But it is not the whole story.

To raise awareness of and fill in some of the disturbing omissions in the history of British art was the aim of a conference at Tate Britain this month and is the topic of Third Text’s current “A very special British Issue”.

It seems a question too obvious to be worth considering. Is British art not art produced in Britain that engages with and reflects upon the socio–cultural and historical conditions that have shaped Britain’s identity? Then why does the officially recognized and institutionally sanctified and taught history of modern British art produced over the last 60 years not reflect the reality of life in Britain’s multiracial and postcolonial society?

According to Rasheed Areen, London based conceptual artist, writer and founder of Third Text, this has happened because of Britain’s resistance to dismantle its prevailing imperial worldview and cultural hegemony over its former colonial subjects. This has produced a split in the history of British art: the official version, which includes audience and publicity friendly white artists such as the above, and the unofficial “other story” produced by artists who emigrated to post–war Britain from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. This failure to decolonize the mind has led to the perpetuation of falsified knowledge and institutional erasure of said artists from the sanctioned canon of modern art history.

This situation however is obscured by art’s position in the marketplace and the recent commercial success of some non–white artists. Chris Ofili’s Upper Room at Tate Britain comes to mind, or indeed Yinka Shonibare’s acceptance of an MBE by the Prince of Wales in 2005. They are the new celebrated black stars of the British art world, the latter of whom has just been awarded the commission to make a piece of work for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, putting him again at the heart of the Establishment. In the light of these recent success stories you would be forgiven to think that we are living in an integrated multiracial society with an integrated history of achievements.
What we have however, according to Areen, is a divided Britain; divided between its dominant white mainstream and its non–white artists who are relegated to the institutionally funded and promoted ethnic minority ghetto and celebrated under the banner of cultural diversity — as long as they do not penetrate or disturb the core discourses of modernism. In other words, non–white artists will have a place in art institutions and popular consciousness as long as they use a visual language or speak about what they are “qualified” to speak about: “their own” cultures.

This exclusion of non–white artists from the history of modern British art is a struggle essentially fought on an ideological level, as art history itself is a worldview, a fiction created and perpetuated to protect and justify the position of dominance of the mainstream art institutions.

This has thrown art into a crisis. Instead of uniting us by providing the framework within which we can reach out and share our personal stories, art in its current state is stripping us of our humanity by reinforcing artificial divisions along lines of race and gender and inviting us to consume each other as objects, whose current market value is determined by Sensations, Friezes and Biennales.
And yes, we do have to throw gender into the mix too, despite of the fact that admitting to have feminist inclinations is considered to be terribly out of fashion and no longer relevant! Unfortunately, gender issues are more relevant than ever in the light of the policy of a new South London based gallery, which confessed to exclusively taking on male artists as females are supposed to be less likely to deliver!

That we are still trapped in these institutionally enforced ghettos of race and gender is powerfully and ironically illustrated in the set up of this symposium at Tate Britain. The panel of speakers was almost exclusively white and male except for Asian artist and writer, Rasheed Areen, and lecturer, Alison Green. Furthermore, this was clearly a highly abstract, intellectual debate within an institutional setting and framework not accessible to most artists or members of the public (financially and due to its use of exclusive and specific academic discourse). If we want this debate to have meaning beyond the edification of an intellectual elite we need to penetrate this institutional elitism and insert this debate into the real world.
I do not wish to discredit the effort nor the aim of this conference, which was indeed highly relevant, indispensable and inspiring!

But in order for real change to happen, we need to see and acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things. It is those same underlying hegemonic dynamics and power relations at work that marginalize or exclude certain knowledges, artists, and practices whether it is on the basis of race, culture, nationality and gender. We need a holistic vision to un–write and re–write art history to be an inclusive project and allow this revolution to happen not only on a theoretical level through debate within certain institutions but within the hearts and minds of everyone via the work that we decide to make and show.

Coming up in November: The Status of Difference http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/talks/thestatusofdifference.htm

Antonio Da Veiga Rocha is an international interdisciplinary artist and writer.
www.antoniorocha.com

Alex Brew: Your Revolution – the Remix

I feel on edge, strangely torn between feeling excited, vulnerable and sick to the stomach at the same time. Alex Brew’s images from her recent project ‘Asking for it’ are beyond uncomfortable, something closer to unbearable. They reveal the hidden internalized dynamics of power inherent in our everyday lives and interactions between men and women.
Alex Brew is a feminist activist, art photographer and writer living in London. For ‘Asking for it’, which was shown at Ladyfest London earlier this year, the artist approached men in public places – outside offices, pubs, cafes and gentlemen’s venues often in London’s square mile. She confronted them with her camera and sometimes asked them to fully or partially undress in a more private space – in an alleyway, a car park, or back at their place or hers.
For Brew, photography is a way to put feminist ideas to the test. She says: “It forces me into situations and it allows me to present a truth rarely found in the media. I use it as a form of activism: sometimes by challenging media and pop culture stereotypes of feminists and sometimes by highlighting society’s treatment of women forcing them into vulnerable situations.”

The images are inherently powerful as they reverse the socio–cultural dynamics of objectification. Instead of woman being subjected to the male gaze, this time the tables have turned. It is the photographer, a woman, on top of her subject, who is stripped, if only for a moment, not only of his clothes but his power. However, far from being stable, the situation is fundamentally volatile. A palpable sense of tension is in the air, the power relations re–negotiated are always bound to change at any moment.
The situation of photographer and subject exemplifies the power relations in a wider social context. There is no safety for woman if she decides to go after a positive, active sexuality. She is ‘asking for it’ and thereby exposing herself to scorn, alienation, and violence. The alternative however, a life of shy smiles, of pandering to man’s ego, passivity and submission are a sure road to double–consciousness and self–objectification. There is no singular answer, but it is a choice women have to negotiate in their interactions with fathers, brothers, partners, bosses and strangers on a daily basis.

A part of ‘Asking for it’, including audio recordings for the first time, will be shown at Aberdeen University at the end of October. Alex Brew has talked in schools about the project alongside sessions on sexual violence and pornography organized by Rape Crisis and has been asked to give talks at universities and across the UK by academics and workers in the field of sexual violence.
For more information visit her space at www.alexbrew.co.uk

Peckham Street Training or the Art of Re–connecting with your Inner Revolutionary

One fine Saturday in September I tried to follow the hissing sounds of a snake while stumbling around in the darkness of my closed eyes under a bridge in Peckham. Ok, I admit it, I peaked–more than once!
Trying to ignore the little mean voice in my head who keeps dutifully popping up to remind me that I look like a bloody idiot I play animal games with a group of kids and other adults, who until a minute ago all seemed perfectly sane to me! Now everyone has literally gone barking mad imitating animal sounds while playing hide and seek. And I have to say all the foolishness feels positively exhilarating.

The scenario described is part of Peckham Street Training, the second project of Peckham Space featuring artist Lottie Child and net art organization Furtherfield.org. Peckham Street Training is based on the idea that our environment, the spaces we move through, shape the way we think, feel and behave. Especially the architecture of the city is designed in a very functional way to impose a certain sense of order and structure within the context of a gendered and racialised capitalist consumer society.
The spirit of Peckham Street Training is to develop techniques to challenge and subvert our traditional uses of public space and the social norms engrained in it. Street Training is training together to behave safely and joyfully in order to have a positive effect on ourselves, each other, and the streets we move through.

And who to better turn to for advice than a group of local 10year–olds from Gloucester Primary School. Children often engage much more directly, creatively and playfully with their surroundings. Much more than just fun, play involves looking at familiar places in new ways and helps develop children’s abilities to be creative and flexible in dealing with new situations. In this sense, play is not just important for children but also for adults.
And years of socialization to conform to certain behavioural codes in public spaces aren’t easily undone! It demands stepping over that barrier and making yourself look like a complete fool. After a little general hesitation and accompanied by lots of embarrassed giggling the first start rolling down the grassy hill (after carefully checking for dog poo), climbing up lampposts and sliding down railings. And amidst all the excitement I am beginning to wonder at just what point we lost our inner child- and at what cost.

The artist Lottie Child works and lives in London. Her practice includes participatory, live art explorations of public space, utilising strategies of collaboration and spontaneous interaction. These strategies can be conceived as ‘urban survival skills for the twenty first century’ that explore notions of play, the politics of the urban built environment, risk taking and the use of new technologies.
Through her work, people are invited to share their expertise and subjective responses to the notions of freedom of movement and anti social behaviour in increasingly sanitised and controlled urban environments. Previous projects include Guerrilla Gardening, Tannoy Hijacking, Guide to Risk in the City, Hi5 Game for Cyclists and Climbing Club.

Peckham Space is a new art programme that commissions socially engaged contemporary art in South East London. Its artistic programme will feature four commissions per year that will produce new artworks made in response to the locale of Peckham. The programme will support collaborative practices that forge sustainable links between the arts and the local community, and will play an important role in the larger development of Peckham’s cultural quarter. For more information visit www.peckhamspace.com

Preview: Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery @ The Southbank Centre

This year has seen many celebrations of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade over 200 years ago. What most of us are largely unaware of and our national leaders and multinational owners and profit-makers conveniently forget is the disturbing extent of modern day slavery. Using the power of documentary photography, eight internationally acclaimed photographers zoom in on life and debt, the price some of us have to pay for globalization, and grant insight into the lives of the voiceless and ignored.
In fact, an estimated 27 million people, possibly more than at any previous time in history, are still locked into slavery and servitude across the globe. Rather than being based on formal ownership, slavery in the modern world is established and perpetuated through legal instruments such as contracts and debts; slaves are drawn from the poor, vulnerable and dispossessed.

“I wanted to address the here and now, to draw attention to the fact that human trafficking for commercial gain is still a global problem and that today, as in the past, global economic market forces are the major contributing factor in making human life disposable,” says Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph ABP.

The photographers featured in this outstanding and crucial exhibition are:

Abbas- documenting child labour in Bangladesh
Ian Berry- examining the effect of international trade rules on farmers in Ghana
Stuart Franklin- exploring chattel slavery in Sudan
Jim Goldberg- documenting the trafficking of young people from Eastern Europe
Susan Meiselas- investigating the conditions of Indonesian women working in Singapore as domestic servants
Paolo Pellegrin- documenting Haitian 'Restaveks' (child slaves)
Chris Steele-Perkins- documenting South Korean women who were held as sex slaves by the Japanese in World War II and are still seeking restitution
Alex Webb- photographing Haitian cane workers held in organized bonded labour in the Dominican Republic

Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery
A Hayward Touring Exhibition in collaboration with Autograph ABP and Magnum Photos
The Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
27 September- 9 November 2008
Opening Times: 10am-11pm daily
Admission free
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts

Hew Locke: Kingdom of the Blind @ Rivington Place

It's cheap, loud and unapologetically trashy. Experiencing Hew Locke's major new installation commissioned by Iniva at Rivington Place feels a little bit like being hit over the head with a plastic dinosaur or strangled with one of the fake gold chains that adorn Locke's figurative sculptural installation. It is an overwhelming affair.
Once your eyes adjust to the brightness and visual noise of what is on display you cannot help but get drawn into the rich surface detail of his figures. Here, a random array of pound shop paraphernalia such as machine gun replicas, glass beads, plastic flowers, baby dolls heads and arms that seem to wave at you fight battles for the viewer's attention.

And this is exactly it! Far from being another sickly sweet, nihilistic post-modern pop installation made up of appropriated and re-assembled consumer culture detritus, Locke's work is essentially political in nature raising important issues regarding power relations and notions of cultural identity in a post-imperial Britain.
For the past 10 years Locke's often large-scale installations, wall drawings and sculptures have explored the visual display of those in power. His choice of mass-produced, bright, and mundane material stands in sharp contrast to his subject matter: the iconographies and language of royalty and government.
In Kingdom of the Blind, Locke brings together these formal and thematic elements of his practice to create a 'museum display'- a fictional collection of possessions of an imaginary ruler. The installation combines a carnivalesque frieze of monumental figures (reaching up to 14ft tall) with an elaborate backdrop of wall drawings. Depicting this fictional leader's rise to power, Locke's figures enact victorious moments in battle and resemble elaborate votive objects composed of said medley of miniature plastic animals, fake leather handbags and sequins.

This chaotic and flamboyant commemoration of individual power becomes a poignant parody of today's social and political global climate. Presented through the formal language of traditional museum display, Locke's allusions to the discourse of contemporary dictatorships and war assume a powerful commentary on our national cultural institutions and their relationship to the modern constructs of history and society, cultural identity and national pride.

Kingdom of the Blind is on view at Rivington Place until 20th October 2008.
Rivington Place home of Iniva and Autograph ABP is a new £8m public building in the heart of Shoreditch. A cutting edge institution, it is dedicated to the education of the public in culturally diverse visual arts and photography and is positioned at the intersection of contemporary arts, cultural studies, research and education. It brings the work of artists from culturally diverse backgrounds to the attention of the widest possible public and thereby generates debates and questions widely accepted assumptions about contemporary art and mainstream culture.
For more information visit www.iniva.org or www.rivingtonplace.org

Blu skies over Berlin

You must have heard of him by now, or at least you should have. If you haven't, your hopeless ignorance is clearly cramping your style. You better do your research and believe the hype!
Blu is the word!
I cannot remember when I first got to see his animation Muto, only that it was some time before his work adorned the façade of the Tate Modern as part of their Street Art exhibition (until 25th August 08). It was the first piece I ever saw by him and possibly his most exciting to date. His painted and animated street art story defies categorization. Using the walls of the cities of Buenos Aires and Baden as his canvases he created a dark and fascinating fairy tale of men and (or perhaps as) monsters morphing and eventually devouring themselves. They are of a minimalist, almost naïve beauty and an ambiguous and disturbing brutality, at the same time (http://www.vimeo.com/993998).

Blu is exploding the boundaries of the definition of street art, not least in terms of scale. Houses never seem quite big enough for his mythical cartoon-like creatures, which he executes in a very limited palette highlighting his fascination with line and form. What is impressive and refreshing about his wall paintings, which sprawl up house facades and walls all over the world is his ability to doodle in a seemingly casual way on an epic scale referencing cycles of life, death and re-birth.
Using the urban environment as a blank canvas is nothing new, but transforming whole buildings into gigantic sculptures and making them come to life in the most unpredictable mesmerizing ways is truly amazing.

Katrin König: An Introverted Excavator

The shapes that occupy Katrin König's work and seem to hover on the surface of her most delicate yet monumental mixed media prints are reminiscent of fossils or aerial shots of archeological excavation sites. Far from being accidental however, they are the result of an inward and outward journey, the sediments of everything that touched her life and made a mark on her soul.
Characterized by a radically unique visual language, her work is also the result of a complex process. After manipulating the surface and shape of various pieces of cardboard with a compass saw Katrin prints these in layers onto several sheets of paper or aluminium foil, which are then connected to a whole. The enormous size and visual depth of her work creates immediacy and intimacy, it demands our presence and collapses definitions of time, of past and presence, into a state of acute awareness.

Katrin König was born and grew up in Eisenberg, a small town in the former GDR. Because of her parents' oppositional stance and criticism of the former communist regime her initial application to study art at an East German university was rejected. Denied a place in higher education she enrolled for an apprenticeship in porcelain painting. However, far from giving her the creative freedom she had hoped for she had to resign herself to working long hours in the local factory for very little money. Life under the regime was marked by constant control, dependency and ambivalence. One's path in life was pre-determined, there was no room for personal choice or individuality. Freedom of expression was inconceivable, even dangerous. One was required to function in the machinery of the state, which was one's ultimate purpose in life.
Speaking in a quiet voice, Katrin recalls the despair, the longing and her escapism in the form of drawing and painting. She recalls the end of the GDR, and the reunification of East and West Germany. Losing her job at the porcelain factory came as the greatest blessing, yet was only the beginning of an arduous journey of reclaiming her life and following her dream of becoming an artist.
Managing the newfound freedom and independence and taking on the responsibility for their own life was an adjustment many people could not cope with at the time. And so it took another 6 years of struggle and hard work until the day she finally began her studies at Halle University, “a decicive moment, when my life began at last”. Hearing her speak about her life and work, both of which are inextricably intertwined one is touched by her quiet strength and emotional honesty. Her determination, dedication and commitment to growth are the qualities that make her stand out as an artist and a person. And as such her journey continues deeper into the unconscious to excavate memories of time and place in search for veracity.