Germaine Koh
16 Sep - 02 Oct 2005
Germaine Koh
16 September - 02 October 2005
Studio 3
Germaine Koh stages her art as a form of apparently casual, yet calculated theatre. In her hands, everyday places and objects, familiar situations and actions are transformed into astonishingly salient scenarios, and the audience must make sense of these. They are obliged to work out for themselves how the objects and actions confronting them came to be where they are, and what conceivable intention lies behind them. The absurd demands an answer. In Koh’s work, passers-by are tempted to speculate.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the artist has developed into a specialist for public space, who often even relates gallery works to the world outside or uses them to focus on the transition into public space. Her exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien brings this process to a head, presenting a piece of outdoor space in the middle of the enclosed studio.
Germaine Koh has placed a section of urban wasteland found in the city of Berlin into the studio. The clumps of ground, laid out to fill the room as if they were a huge carpet, are grown over by grass and weeds and populated with the usual tiny creatures. The artist will be watering, cultivating and caring for this transferred biotope during the exhibition, meaning that her art can grow and flourish beneath the visitors’ feet.
This metaphor of slow growth may have an ironic appeal in an artists’ residence, but Koh leaves it entirely up to the public to make points and draw conclusions. Gradually, visitors discover that they are walking on a section of the “death strip” beside the Wall - which was once close by - and that grass has now grown, quite literally, over this chapter of history. But above all, they watch a vegetative change that takes place quite naturally, completely disregarding art and its viewers, who will nonetheless see the usual gaps and empty spaces in the city with different eyes in future.
16 September - 02 October 2005
Studio 3
Germaine Koh stages her art as a form of apparently casual, yet calculated theatre. In her hands, everyday places and objects, familiar situations and actions are transformed into astonishingly salient scenarios, and the audience must make sense of these. They are obliged to work out for themselves how the objects and actions confronting them came to be where they are, and what conceivable intention lies behind them. The absurd demands an answer. In Koh’s work, passers-by are tempted to speculate.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the artist has developed into a specialist for public space, who often even relates gallery works to the world outside or uses them to focus on the transition into public space. Her exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien brings this process to a head, presenting a piece of outdoor space in the middle of the enclosed studio.
Germaine Koh has placed a section of urban wasteland found in the city of Berlin into the studio. The clumps of ground, laid out to fill the room as if they were a huge carpet, are grown over by grass and weeds and populated with the usual tiny creatures. The artist will be watering, cultivating and caring for this transferred biotope during the exhibition, meaning that her art can grow and flourish beneath the visitors’ feet.
This metaphor of slow growth may have an ironic appeal in an artists’ residence, but Koh leaves it entirely up to the public to make points and draw conclusions. Gradually, visitors discover that they are walking on a section of the “death strip” beside the Wall - which was once close by - and that grass has now grown, quite literally, over this chapter of history. But above all, they watch a vegetative change that takes place quite naturally, completely disregarding art and its viewers, who will nonetheless see the usual gaps and empty spaces in the city with different eyes in future.