Katinka Bock Rauschen
March 6, 2020-August 23, 2020
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (DE)
Lea Altner:
Your works are often created through seemingly simple actions such as kneading, rolling, stretching, balancing and breaking. You also incorporate physical processes such as evaporation, burning or the change in material caused by the weather, all of which are essentially beyond your control. What is your relationship to chance in your work?
Katinka Bock:
Chance is certainly a reality that I welcome. It is great to recognise and seize the moment when something falls into our hands or when a sculpture finds its right place as if by itself. But the decision is just as important, because randomness is easily confused with arbitrariness. I always keep the option of changing my mind, because every artistic concept seems pointless to me if it doesn't find its right place and a form that goes beyond the planned concept.
Lea Altner:
You have created a new monumental sculpture from copper plates that covered the dome of the neighbouring Anzeiger skyscraper for almost a hundred years and have now been removed in the course of a restoration. When choosing the individual copper plates, the traces left by the weather, birds and the war were very important to you. What role does the material play for you as a carrier of memories and history?
Katinka Bock:
We are shaped by our experiences, feelings and thoughts; we absorb everything, wholesome or toxic, tender or violent. The banal is often close to the particular and so I read in the copper plates of the building a part of European and German history, but I also read about the points of the compass, the city birds, the air pollution.Sometimes bomb splinters and hail are not so precisely separated from each other. History and memories are formative and one can often see in the skin or in the gaze of a person a clue to their life. Nevertheless, my perspective remains forward-looking, I accept these traces more as a status quo without sublimating them.
(Excerpt Artist Talk Katinka Bock )
Curators: Christina Végh, Lea Altner
Photos: Raimund Zakowski