M HKA Ensembles

Installation

Collection: Courtesy Katrin Kamrau.

The artistic practice of Katrin Kamrau (b. 1981) emerges from an intense interest in our perception of the optical image. Here, she focuses on the medium of photography in combination with issues related to social interactions and power structures.

Kamrau first presented her piece SPEKTRUM Shelf during Open Studios in HISK (2013). She describes it as an open-ended series. For this exhibition, the work consists of six shelves of photographs, each on a different theme with regards to the medium of photography: time, the dominant view, the object, the subject, observation and light. The central questions she investigates here are: Who put down which fundamentals? And what does the image tell us about it?

Kamrau aims to refute the power relationships inherent to visual images. With her own images she makes an explicit attempt not to one-sidedly dominate the viewer. Only when we consider the entire entity, does the meaning of her series become clear. It is through our associative perception of the constituent parts that the whole becomes revealed. Moreover, Kamrau's piece also raises questions to do with the presence of the work in space, such as: How does the viewer approach the image? What is his/her feeling of the space? How do we measure ourselves physically with respect to the dimensions of the photographic image?

Here the artist focuses on the medium of photography as a mental construct in Western consciousness. Complimentary to this more conceptual question is, as well, her interest in the use of photography in the media and society-at-large. Under the overarching title SPEKTRUM, she works with objects, photographs and prints combined in site-specific installations.