From December 6, 2013, to January 10, 2014, the Quartier am Hafen studio house presented a site-specific spatial installation with new works by artists Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen as part of its exhibition program, curated by Anne Mager.

“If nobody asks me about it, I know it; but if I want to explain it to someone asking, I don’t know it.” (Augustine on the nature of time)

Should we imagine Sisyphus as a happy man, as Camus suggested? After all, apart from the never-ending toil, he remains master of his days, his rock, and ultimately his fate.

Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen also developed their own time and space dimension in their joint exhibition at Quartier am Hafen. The PAUSE exhibition played with the possibilities of repetition, infinity, and precisely placed moments of irritation—at its own unique pace.

The two artists share a visible fascination with the wealth of possibilities offered by media and materials. They also give their work processes procedural freedom, which leads to unexpected yet intended results—coincidences cannot be planned, but they can be used methodically. It is the small shifts and inaccuracies that are trend-setting in the work of Katja Donnerstag and Yvonne Klasen, lending their work a poetic lightness far beyond mere arbitrariness.

This is also the case with the carefully developed interventions in the exhibition space of 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 break from routines and hectic hype, but rather a precise, sensitive, yet airy and light observation of space, time, and situation.