Ulrike Schick

How does one read a picture that is environment? How does one walk along, how does one experience a picture space the fragility of which forbids the slightest touch? With the eyes, just with the eyes, one feels tempted to say straight out just as one would with a two-dimensional one! Considering the deliberate confusion which Danuta Karsten produces, many a view is driven to despair. The supposed chaos is too unstable, the forms and colours in space and light are too diverse! Only gradually, almost hesitantly contours, volume, and material explain themselves. The exhibition space is being entered via a spiral staircase from down below. Unexpectedly, a standpoint is exposed, from which one starts reading the picture. Thousands of paper spirals on invisible strings fall from the roof, hang down in different rows and heights. Karsten has brought the inner volume of the triangular roof into the room in mirror image. Correspondingly, the spirals are extended from the outside towards the inside. The walkeable area, considerably reduced in its extension, makes it possible to immediately deal with and through ones own bodily motion. While walking about hesitantly, the eye gets carried away in seeming chaos. The papers density and weight at the mercy of which one finds oneself, overwhelms body and eye. Successively, step by step, the abundance of information deciphers itself. One investigates the geometrical clearness with which the single webs were arranged; one finds empty space and spaces in between, one discovers the whole and finds the detail within. The eye disentangles, makes disappear, explains, stops nervous confusion. Time and time again its about puzzling out; tangibility is a process. The changing of standpoint becomes an element of the work. So, seen from beneath, circles fall towards the viewer; looking through it the architecture is being swallowed as if by an avalanche, the view through the paper wood seems to be impossible. Space as well as distances are being defined anew, or called into question. A variety of information floats in the room: from the material value of the paper and its colour, through the light up to the air which, omnipresent, makes the space and its inner life swing. Lightness and weight are united in the spirals coexistence. Torn between the whole and the detail there is no hold for the eye! Always everythings in motion! Depending on the lighting situation the work experiences a new quality. If the light comes from above, the papers glow in their falling down in the most varied shades of white to grey. If the light glides over the papers from all sides, in an all-over so to speak, the single spiral steps back, and everything glows in a homogeneous white. Because of quantity distances arent readable anymore. Here, a painterly moment dominates, there, a graphical, a linear one. With each new standpoint, with each new source of light associations change, too which are connected to the work. Naturally, they all have to do with the phenomenon of temporality. If snowfall or spray, nothing reminds one of duration, nothing remains. The processibility in the actual work process also imparts itself in the perception. The physical nature of the whole thing, the installations body disappears while being looked through. Danuta Karsten compares the cutting of the papers with taking down notes in a diary. The process, the regularity of the cutting as a value, she puts on a level with the writing. Thus, in their repetition, the spirals came into being almost meditatively, accompanied her over 3 months in her daily routine. In the very act of the works implementation, its hanging, she takes up the same moments. Everything remains, the same way as it changes in reality, as in remembering it. The artist created a work which becomes space; a coexisting which is mutually dependent, in volume and lightness, transparency and density, light and shadow. She unites quietness and restlessness, she recounts and yet she knows how to remain silent.