From December 6, 2013 to January 10, 2014, the Atelierhaus Quartier am Hafen showed a site-specific spatial installation with new works by artists Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen, curated by Anne Mager, as part of its exhibition program.
“If no one asks me about it, I know it, but if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know.” (Augustine on the nature of time)
Is Sisyphus to be imagined, as Camus suggests, as a happy man? For apart from the never-ending toil, he remains master of his days, his rock, and ultimately his fate.
Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen also worked out their own time and space dimension in their joint exhibition in the Quartier am Hafen. The exhibition PAUSE played with the possibilities of repetition, endlessness and precisely placed moments of irritation – at a pace all their own.
The two artists are united by a visible fascination with the wealth of possibilities offered by media and materials. They also give their work processes process-like freedom, which leads to unexpected and yet intended results – coincidences cannot be planned, but they can be used methodically. It is the small shifts and inaccuracies that point the way in the work of Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen and give them their poetic lightness far beyond mere arbitrariness.
This is also the case with the carefully developed interventions in the exhibition space of the Quartier am Hafen: the endless communication loops, spatial shifts and repetitions shown here tickle the viewer’s perception. The individual elements of the jointly conceived exhibition unfold their associative and performative character and merge into a situational overall installation.
PAUSE was not a loud escape from routines and hectic hypes, but rather a precise, sensitive and yet light-as-air observation of space, time and situation.