Alicja Kwade
∗1979, Poland
lives and works in Berlin, Germany
“I’m trying to see what the structure of reality could be,” explains Alicja Kwade while she practices her sculptural poetry and explores the lyrical fetishisms of materials. Her sculptures are meditations on time, space and the nature of objects. She engages with the question of what constitutes the “truth” and “time” of an object, and whether this can be equated with the information that describes it. Materials such as stone, glass and wood are transformed in her sculptural arrangement via elaborate, alchemical operations. Through these physical shifts, Kwade proposes new meaning and value.Kwade’s new work, Absorption (Dolomite), conceived especially for the Biennale Gherdëina VI and displayed at the crossway of the pedestrian zone, appropriates original Dolomite stone and invites it into a series of transformations through scanning and duplication. The artist engages the viewer in a vertiginous interplay of perception as the walls of the mirror expand space and reflect the surrounding area, literally absorbing it, as the title suggests. Thus Kwade theatricalizes nature and the human being’s participation in it, creating a situation of sensual and cognitive tension.
Her sculpture Taxa-Dilation on view in Circolo artistico e culturale exemplifies a complexity of transformative processes the artist is interested in. For this work, Alicja Kwade scanned an original, approximately 200-million-year-old fossilized ammonite from the collection of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. The ammonite’s spiral was then digitally separated and manipulated into four new forms – a series of three spiral forms unfolding in three stages and one straightened-out – whose cores were then physically built. Taxa, in biological terms, describes a unity of classification attributed to a group of living organisms according to a set of particularly defined criteria. This classification usually expresses itself by designating a name to this group. The title of the work refers to two of its aspects; it describes both a diversification of types and a more formal process of expansion and dissolution. In the work, a temporal process is captured and itself fossilized; the spirals’ three stages are conceived as a movement, and can be theorized as fossilized forms showing three stages of the evolution of a living organism in its journey to becoming a new species, a process which affects us all.
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