Main Building
“Die Gesamtheit aller Orte / Totality of All Spaces”
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Alicja Kwade
In her sculptures, installations and photographs, the sculptress Alicja Kwade takes up art historical traditions, theories of natural sciences and sociological questions in an entirely fascinating way. Consequently she touches both contemporary cultural as well as political and economic themes. Kwade changes and manipulates the physical properties of materials, thereby evoking the surprise effects which disconcert the value we place on experience, our attitudes and our viewing habits. The transformation of the simplest everyday objects by way of an elaborate procedure into apparently luxurious artifacts shows our understanding of materials, objects and ideas.
In the work Teleportation, 2011, the light of an object is transported by the reflection in the glass to the next object. The situation changes depending on the viewer’s position; sometimes the object seems to glow, then only half so, then to be turned off completely.
The work refers to the idea that there are 11 dimensions. (String theory) Out of eleven lamps three are turned on – the three dimensions we live in. We can’t see the other dimensions, because we cannot pass these invisible boarders. The glass acts as an invisible boarder.
Grad der Gewissheit, 2012 (C-Print, framed, 11 parts)
A series of eleven photographs made with a high-speed still camera. The five dice have been thrown eleven times. The dice are pictured in motion; systems for calculating probability are held in stasis and remain unknown. The eleven photographs also refer to the concept proposed by String Theory of space having eleven dimensions.
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“That has nothing to do with a masking of consequences. It is not about the comprehensible, about reconstructing an experience; it is about the abstract, the absurd, about what cannot be explained or experienced and is jet forever present, and about the attempt to understand it.”
Alicja Kwade interview med Katja Schroeder