Kerstin Kartscher 

‘'Private War'
Sylvester Space

In her drawings and installations Kerstin Kartscher sketches out imaginary worlds with an atmosphere that shifts between the utopian and apocalyptic. Like still images from an unwritten turn-of-the-century novel, these scenarios evoke the quest of nameless heroines through allusion and innuendo. In the drawings words sometimes appear in the sky over troubled waters, spelling out words that hint at desires, dreams or fears but never reveal a story.

Kartscher's installation ‘'Private War' comprises a canvas tent that houses a bed, a washbasin, bulbous bottles. The canvas at the back of the tent is filled with drawings depicting the facades of modernist tower blocks. Evoking the scenario of a hospital or sanatorium, the installation dwells on the conflicting emotions connected with such space: a sanctuary and shelter, it is also a confined space that isolates the body in pain. In modernity, it is here that life begins and ends.

In Thomas Mann’s novel ‘Magic Mountain’, the sanatorium is portrayed as space where time flows at a different pace while its wealthy patients may spend months gazing at the mountains to cure their overwrought nerves and recover from the exhaustion induced by modern life. It is such a transitory space of exhaustion and convalescence that Kartscher conjures up; a space where the time of work is interrupted, there is nothing to be done and no job to be performed. Even so, it is a place of ‘becoming’ where the self confronts itself in the experience of pain, rest, boredom and a re-awakening of the senses in the moment of convalescence.

Image credit: Kerstin Kartscher, ‘Private War’ (2005), photo by Matthias Kolb. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch.