Katinka Bock: Commotion in Higienópolis

The matrix for this exhibition by Katinka Bock, a German artist living in Paris, is the Anzeiger-Hochhaus in Hanover. A landmark in the city, the building was at the forefront of intellectual life and innovation in Germany in the 1930s, when news weeklies Der Stern and Der Spiegel were founded there. Ongoing restoration work has enabled the artist to recover some one hundred of the copper sheets that covered its distinctive dome. Patinated with age and marked by the ravages of time, they take on a new form; that of a monumental installation that hangs in the exhibition tower at Lafayette Anticipations. Several other sculptures by Katinka Bock are shown inside and outside the foundation spaces. All these works result from her investigations of different places, their physical and material conditions as well as their historical, social and political charge.

“For Katinka Bock, absence is a presence by default that always generates residual traces, clues to a vanished past. The central work of the exhibition, Rauschen, produced by Lafayette Anticipations and suspended in the middle of its building, assembles several registers of absence. It is a monumental sculpture covered with copper plates brought back from Hanover. Its shape is an enlarged reproduction of a small clay sculpture, entitled Wunschkonzert, also presented in the exhibition. This work is the result of a recurrent experimental practice in Katinka Bock’s work, which consists in wrapping an object in a fresh clay sheet and putting it all in an oven, making the object disappear by its combustion while keeping the void left by its volume intact. The original sculpture housed a balloon found in the street. Katinka likes to work with objects that have been loved, played with, desired. They are Lieblingsobjekte, as she calls them—objects of desire. Thus, the monumental work Rauschen summons in its empty belly several significant levels of disappearances: the intimate and the historical, the commotion and the daily news, which Henri Bergson described as the mass of modern times.”

François Quintin, Director of Lafayette Anticipations

As part of the exhibition, the TUMULTES newspaper will be published during public workshops and riso printed on-site. Led by Thomas Boutoux (critic, publisher, teacher) and Clara Schulmann (critic, teacher), with graphic designers Pierre Pierre, the project aims to create a journal—from producing content to publication—in just 24 hours, ready for visitors to pick up the following day.

A booklet (part of the “Carnets” collection), risograph-printed at the Foundation, will be published at the opening the exhibition and available throughout the show.

Exhibition organized in collaboration with the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover.
With the support of Madsack.