Karin Ludmann

b. 1971, Germany

My work is primarily the result of various technical and conceptual experiments treating the functional displacement of everyday occurrences when taken out of their context. I use various media – sculpture, video and installation – to explore the traces of everyday life and to search for cultural reasons for everyday actions and behavioural patterns. Separated from their proper conventional function, objects of daily use change into strange mutants which imitate vegetables sprouting and rotting in a very rudimentary, mechanical way. These mechanical constructions have lost their initial designation and seem to escape from their workaday routine to become apparently autonomous entities following their own inclinations. The machine-objects are research dispositions, comments and disclosures on a paradoxical world, which refer to the functioning along accurate preconstructed patterns of behaviour. So some special functions become the starting point of irrational and absurd actions and proceedings, which manipulate the usual perception of an object and its function.

(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)