Karin Karinna Bühler (born in 1974) has been a guest artist in the Sitterwerk for three months since January 2014. At the beginning of her stay, she spent time looking through the Art Library and Material Archive. When doing so, she first entered various search terms of importance to her in the web catalogue such as, for example: imagination, association, text, idea, knowledge, or spatial perception. She thus came across, among others, the publication Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 by Lucy R. Lippard and recognized her own artistic approach in this book. Since her works are also often “dematerialized.” What is of interest for Karin Karinna Bühler is how a visual concept emerges and is developed further by the person who encounters it. For her, the actual work of art arises in the mind of each individual person. For “Die Gewissheit und andere Illusionen” (Certainty and Other Illusions) in 2013, she thus used a found stone as a transmitter and invited six people to formulate and then present a story for this stone (Speculation/Conjecture 1 to 6, by et al. Andres Lutz or Jost Hochuli). Situation-dependent stories, memories, and texts are multiplex triggers for what interests Karin Karinna Bühler. She collects memories and thoughts of other people to then arrange them superimposed spatially and temporally. Thus also in the work “Meine Welt ist nicht Deine Welt” (My World is Not Your World) of 2008, an audio, guided tour narrated by a blind man about how he perceives the city of St. Gallen. Based on his descriptions, those who take the audio, guided tour are able to follow the same path. Similar spatiotemporal superimpositions are also found in the photo work created on site “Sitterthal, St. Gallen, 18.02.2014.” Her father connects memories of his first place of work with the industrial site. Around 1967, he worked as a lab assistant on the site, which was a productive textile dye-works at that time. They strolled through the site together with the aim of evoking as many and precise memories of that time as possible. She documented the tour in photos and supplemented them with brief text passages of his memories so that viewers of the image/text sequences are given unexpected access to the site.
She also reacts to the studio situation per se with the question of creative activity. With the “Tagschläferstätte” (Day-Sleeper Site), she makes reference to the creative moment that a catnap comprises when one is overworked: when a person dozes, information moves freely between the subconscious and the waking state and can thus lead to the development of ideas. And under strict conceptual specifications, she attempts to achieve a creative state in which she has one ink cartridge drip onto each sheet of A4 paper and connects individual splatters of the still liquid ink to form letters. Wax tablets as bearers of information, which were presented in an exhibition in the Material Archive at the beginning of 2014, inspired Karin Karinna Bühler to create a further work. With the supply of wax that is frequently used in the Kunstgiesserei, she produced blanks. A seer associated and described simple forms for the structures in the blanks, which are recorded as sketches on a supplementary sheet of paper.
Karin Karinna Bühler lives and works at Palais Bleu, Trogen. She was part of the team of the project space exex (today NEXTEX) and worked as co-president of visarte.ost. Since 2008, she has been organizing Le-lieu in Palais Bleu, a platform for site-related art production.
Open Studio
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
starting at 6pm, with bar and food