The artist Katja Schenker works largely with performance, sculpture and drawing techniques. The multi-part exhibition “Die Augen der Hand (The Hand’s Eyes)” is an attempt to offer a view of Schenker’s work from numerous perspectives, serving as an invitation to experience them sensuously or indeed bodily. In her latest works the artist uses her own catalogue almost as a quarry. Katja Schenker is her own geology. Her work, which is always predicated on human experience, constantly creeps like a growing glacier. In the process, one of the ultimate question concerns the giving and taking of space. As opposed to customary geological artefacts, Schenker’s works also involve the co-inscription of the sensuality of the individual human body. In many respects her works have parallels with geological processes, which would normally be incompatible with the short temporality of human life or the human body. For this reason the artist accelerates these protracted processes within the framework of human transience in the form of imprints, impressions, skins and bodies. Perhaps this constant acceleration and the unerring examination they’re subject to explains why a topography by Katja Schenker is there to be discovered in the topography of Kreuzlingen and of Switzerland. The exhibition is an invitation to walk through this topography as an interconnected surface and to experience the works contextually both in the Kunstraum and beyond.
—Reto Müller, Curator
An alternative vision of the world manifests not only that which we see but above all that which we bodily feel. In the process, this tension between the softness of the body and the hardness of the material assumes a central thematic focus that permeates Katja Schenker’s works.
Her work is characterised by performances and installations; it explores the sensuality of processes, the merging of material opposites and the transformation through physical presence.
Her performances and installations are not isolated episodes, rather the climax of a process of creation in which material is shaped via gentle, sensual touching in order to ultimately achieve a contrast between softness and hardness. The choice of materials plays a decisive role in this. The artist’s interest in materiality and sensuality leads to a profound immersion in the material in which the form-giving reaches a tactile depth. The relationship between the form and its negative, between the body and its imprint, is of key importance, whereby neither aspect dominates the other. This interplay between presence and absence, between fullness and emptiness, defines the topography of her installations and performances, which also constitutes the guiding conceptual thread through the installations in the current “Die Augen der Hand” exhibition. The exhibition presents itself to the viewers as a landscape of these systems, with echoes of a cragged park, in which each element should be seen in terms of its uniqueness but simultaneously as part of all-embracing, inclusive idea. This entices us to ask: what does a body leave behind in a space and in a void?
Katja Schenker has developed a working process that combines performance and sculpture, at the same time using drawing, photography and video to deepen the various phases of her creative actions and as forms of documentation. Her performances and her performatively evolved works are complex acts that often emerge from emotional intentions that are then sketched, staged and finally manifested in sculptures that then retain the traces of the creative act. Her body interacts with the materials and objects, which are often transformed through repeated bodily exertion. This reciprocal relationship between the artist and the material is central: Katja Schenker doesn’t just use the laws of the materials as her bodily tool, she is also prepared to allow the materials to impact on us to the limits of their physical scope and thus challenge the boundaries of the space and the moment. As such, the fragile equilibrium between controlling and allowing things to happen is constantly present in her works—and indeed her most important driving force. She condenses our existence to empathetic metaphors that then touch and challenge us.
—Sibilla Panzeri
If we as humans want to learn something about earth’s history, we begin to dig. We burrow through the rock strata and sediments, analyse the stones and soil, their density and composition. Impressions and faint copies of existences and corperealities lived long ago and long forgotten. Stone as a material conserves history and stories for millions and millions of years, apparently simply waiting patiently to be revealed again.
Set against this background, Katja Schenker’s work opens up multilayered lines of discourse. So it is, if we like, that the artist hazards an experiment that has already lasted for years and decades: she petrifies her own story and her own feelings in harmony with her body, creating her very own, detached, microcosmic earth’s history. An unbelievable endeavour between the parameters and against time in which her installations and performances should in no way be seen as isolated events but far more as slow-motion eruptions that appear as moments of manifestation in a continuous process. And with any luck, we the viewers can soon unearth the contradictions and interactions that concretely shape Schenker’s work: the mutual relationship between the body and its negative; the possibility to comprehend the world through all our senses. It is here, at this conjunction, that a decisive window reveals itself: as opposed to the vast and eternal planetary scheme of things, Schenker’s geology appears as a microcosmic study that also always explicitly thinks in human terms … that allows for natural feelings … that copetrifies.
Over time, the work continuously created by the artist have reached the state of a type of very own surface that, last but not least, as public spatial objects allows them to be explored almost as if they were a gigantic mycelium beneath our feet. Both overall and in detail. Everything is interconnected. Time and stone. People and the planet. The body and the process.
—Jeremias Heppeler
Collaboration Credits:
Sibilla Panzeri, Moritz Hossli, Nino Bollag, Thomas Stüssi, Diandra Germann, Sarah Klein, Adrienne Fährmann, Barbara Marie Hofmann, Jeremias Heppeler
Text Translation by
Thomas Skelton-Robinson
at Kunstraum Kreuzlingen
until September 1, 2024