Things are not alive but not dead either, and they certainly are not only the variably arranged fittings of our environment but the prerequisite for our subjectivity: they teach us new experiences and new skills; we need them, we use them, we live with them and on them. It is the most important thing we always consider the most natural thing in the world , and yet this is hardly ever realized – only and exclusively if it has changed, is suddenly missing or no longer usable. Such disorders make us belatedly aware of the fact that there once was something we had grown accustomed to using. The unusual is nothing but the lack of things we used to to take for granted; and the unusual, the unfamiliar, irritates us and not seldom also upsets us – paradoxically it is the lack of superficiality that gives us the feeling of uneasiness and discontent.

But irritation not only results from a sudden change in things; it also happens if you look at them from a different point of view and consequently stumble over the occasionally ambiguous part they play.
It is this side of things in which Karin Sander is interested. Her intrusions upon given situations, rooms, walls, floors, and tapestries seem simple, but they are subtle. So, for instance, she polishes the color of a painted wall until the polished part begins to shine, until it shows something otherwise invisible. With the help of such wall pieces, Karin Sander managed to bring situations from neighboring passageways into her own room at the Kunstmuseum Bonn; at the Kunsthalle Bremen, her wall piece helped the light falling in from above to reveal a particular presence;

>> MORE