ARCH+KUNST – Karin Sander (DE/EN)

Beyond their purpose of mediating an artist’s practice, artists’ books are often media of artistic expression in their own right. In extending an invitation to artist Karin Sander to collaborate on this monographic issue, we expressly wanted to be influenced by her practice, which hinges on interventions in the structures of spaces and institutions in order to modify and recontextualize them, offering a new legibility and possibilities of reappropriation. She applied this principle to ARCH+ and devised an issue reflecting on the relation between art and architecture as neighboring disciplines.

Karin Sander and Anh-Linh Ngo in conversation with Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley on the relationship between art and architecture

The history of modernism, Brian O’Doherty suggests in his famous essay “Inside the White Cube” (1976),¹ is so closely bound up with the invention of the White Cube gallery space that changes in the latter reveal how art itself—and by extension society—changes: an idea that is as topical as ever.

Karin Sander’s genius consists in coming up with simple ideas that lead to fascinating results. At least the ideas appear simple; their realization is sometimes a technically highly complex process that may take years to complete.

Children know that things can take many shapes. Every object can always also be something else: the wooden building block can be a car, the pillow a wall, the roll of paper towels a rocket.

In German, the idiom “to hang something from the nail” means giving it up once and for all: your job, pastime, smoking habit, or dreams. Once your boots, your uniform, your chef’s hat, your painter’s smock, or your fiddle hang from a nail, there’s no going back.

This text was written in response to an inquiry from Karin Sander, who forwarded a question she was asked about the role of fiction in her work, especially in her Kitchen Pieces. It prompted me to reflect on issues of authorship and situatedness: Who speaks with which political and cultural intention? I then decided to delegate the question once again, this time to ChatGPT; the text below is an abbreviated and edited answer by ChatGPT.

NX-22725

* Thanks to the unintentional inspiration and technical support of I. K.

– Reflections on the Swiss Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Good fences make good neighbors.

Robert Frost, 1914¹

A neutral reflection on neutrality is essentially impossible, especially from a Swiss vantage point. The status of neutrality, originally imposed on the Swiss Confederation by the major European powers in 1815, has seemingly become part of an extraordinarily successful business model, for which the country even accepts being seen as a coldly calculating pariah state from time to time.

On the occasion of the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Karin Sander and Philip Ursprung quite literally dissolved the wall separating the Swiss Pavilion from its neighbor, the Venezuelan one. Sander’s artistic practice often begins with a gesture of dissolution, unraveling dividing lines, genres, or the separation of an artwork and the space it is exhibited in. How one experiences an already existing space has a pivotal function in the artist’s practice. That said, her approach to space is not static, because temporality, processuality, and the constant consideration of the possible presence of an audience are all key here. Her exhibitions first come to life with their opening: They are not fixed constructs but evolve through continuous individual interactions. Although Sander’s art does not overtly hinge on actions, her point of departure and her art’s expression have a performative thrust. Karin Sander transforms and changes what she finds depending on the context that she encounters on site, not infrequently employing irony and humor in the process.

I am writing these sentences seated in the Mudam Luxembourg, the only museum in Europe where the planning was supervised in its entirety by Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei.

– The Relationship between Art and Architecture Exhibitions

Will the architectural world pardon the fact that the Swiss Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice was entrusted to an artist and an art historian?

When Karin Sander presents photos of her Kitchen Pieces, i.e., fruits and vegetables pinned to a white wall, their effect is at first somewhat akin to the one produced by Karl Blossfeldt’s magnificent photographs of leaves, shoots, stems, and other parts of plants, as in the 1920s publication Urformen der Kunst (Protoforms of Art) with an introduction by Karl Nierendorf.