Karin Sander

Karin Sander (artist, b. 1957) plans an intervention at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein that takes up the everyday activity of trash disposal and translates it into sculpture by using a banal and devalued material, trash. The portal metaphor invoked in the Squanderless project is made physical here:

Through the ceiling of the exhibition space, which is the floor of the n.b.k. offices above, she has had 30-centimeter-wide holes drilled in the places where usually the wastepaper baskets are located. The holes replace the wastepaper baskets, and visibly link administrative practice with the practice of exhibition. Karin Sander captures the everyday gesture of disposal by instructing the n.b.k. employees to ignore the fact that the wastepaper baskets are missing. In this way material that has become useless falls from the administration offices to the exhibition space, and is transformed by way of the shift of context into a constantly growing temporary sculpture. The falling paper—as a metonymic sign of everyday life—becomes an object of the exhibit. This open concept of sculpture shows Karin Sander’s approach, which can be described here as the “brute” transformation of a found situation.

With this intervention, Karin Sander not only shifts the perception of the institutional body itself, but also the perspective of visitors and n.b.k. employees alike. Karin Sander’s works emerge in the context of the location in question. She takes recourse to things already present in the system and that can turn the system against itself. The relations between inside and outside, between an institution and the city space are made legible and displayed in their ambivalence.