Katja Mater at P/////AKT

Artist: Katja Mater

Exhibition title: Dear Sides (Oomph part IV)

Venue: P/////AKT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: September 8 – October 20, 2019

Photography: Charlott Markus / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and P/////AKT, Amsterdam

Dear Sides

When your right hand touches your left hand they are both subject and object of touch, an alternating ambiguous sensation flipping you back and forth between the two. There is a similar fundamental reversibility between seeing and being seen, a shared participation between the seer and the visible, between observer and object.

*Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When things looked at return your gaze, they can perhaps also subtly offer you different ways in which they allow themselves to be seen. Suggesting an exchange between object and subject, from obverse to reverse, a mise en abyme of sight. And would the same apply when it comes to the act of reading and looking at words?

Dear Sides is a new film installation that is generously lending its name to the constellation of new pieces that Katja Mater will be showing at P/////AKT;

“I live in a text driven world with a severely dyslectic brain. Because of my dyslexia it often feels like things can flip around, and do, while it does not make that much of a difference to me. I can read almost as fast up-side-down as right-side-up. Left to right or right to left. Why is it that dyslectics flip their letters, their numbers, follow their own logic and invent their own ways? People with dyslexia do not naturally process written words or take on tasks in a linear manner, they do not work their way from left to right or top to bottom. They tend to approach the world in a more visual way and take in word as shapes from all angles. While writing, they “draw a picture using letters” and orientation does not seem that important.”

As a result, one could say, Mater is essentially interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, recording events that simultaneously can and also cannot be, holding midway between information and interpretation. One way of doing this is by creating hybrids between photography or film with other media, where their interaction is blending and binding them together, where they behave as one but at the same time reveal each other’s distinctive qualities and glitches.

For Mater, time is both tool and material, and her work process (much related to painting) a mediation of time, which she squeezes into a single image. Entangled multiplied or shuffled, performed and recorded, while being counterbalanced with our perception, our understanding and our expectations of both.

In memory of Ruud Molleman — While working on this exhibition I lost a friend and mentor. Ruud helped me to realize many 16 mm film works by specially inventing and building new tools and methods not rarely out of the ordinary. He has been a huge support for me and my work over the years, always open to go off the beaten path. Thank you for all your trust, help and patience, I will miss you deeply.

Very special thanks to Alice Versieux, Seab Deuling, Byrthe Lemmens, Kato Six, Jessica Gysel and Erwin van ‘t Hart.

For more information about the artist, please visit: http://www.katjamater.com

About Oomph

In a way we consider the oomph the highest achievement in art. It’s the sensation, perhaps in the underbelly at first, when you encounter something that touches and convinces you in a very direct yet inexplicable manner, something that happens between the viewer and the work and which is undeniably there: a connection or intuitive/unmediated relation and entrance to the work, even if (or especially if) you cannot quite put your finger on it.

P/////AKT’s 2019 exhibition programme Oomph features solo exhibitions by Ricardo van Eyk, Pedro Barateiro, Mickey Yang, Katja Mater and Leyla Aydoslu.

For more information, please visit: https://www.pakt.nu/2019/oomph-2/

Oomph is supported by Ammodo, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Mondriaan Fonds.

About P/////AKT

P/////AKT is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the opportunity to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.

P/////AKT provides a platform for exceptional, emerging artistic talents, who distinguish themselves through their unique and authentic language and who are capable of giving a different view on the current way of thinking. They are stimulated to work out new developments and are given the opportunity to present their work to a relevant audience. Furthermore, P/////AKT always asks the artists to produce new work that relates to the specific nature and dimensions of the given space and to present their own mental space as an overall presentation within the given context.