Alicja Kwade. Image by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert
This week Alicja Kwade will exhibit her newest installation “Medium Median” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Drawing inspiration from NASA’s data regarding extrasolar meteors, the work presents this astronomical information and references the events leading up to the extinction of dinosaurs. As the artist prepares for opening night, we look back at our 2015 studio visit with the Berlin-based creative, taken from SLEEK issue 46.
“In Berlin it’s quite easy to get comfy,” Alicja Kwade says as we enter the cavernous atrium of her studio. “And I think it’s a bit dangerous.”
Yet, after over a decade in Berlin, Kwade shows no signs of slowing down. The daughter of a gallerist and a professor of cultural studies, at 19 she decided to pursue art when she moved from Hannover to Berlin to attend the acclaimed Universität der Künste. A mainstay in Berlin’s scene since her breakthrough exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in 2008, Kwade recently added 303 Gallery in New York to the growing list of institutions backing her ongoing practice, including Berlin’s Johann König gallery, kamel mennour in Paris, Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt and the Boros Collection.
With a wide array of power tools and scale-models of her various galleries made from foamcore, Kwade’s studio is more of a research lab than a workshop. For example, her most recent solo show “Etwas Abwesendes, dessen Anwesenheit erwartet wurde” (Something absent, whose presence was expected) featured two-tonne slabs of Greek marble that stood eight-heads high and were later systematically shattered by the gallery’s local stonemason, and a set of styrofoam body doubles, layered under cardboard scraps and bubble wrap. Elsewhere, her obsessions also lean toward the intersection of science and philosophy, and she has recently found herself fascinated with subatomic matter.
“It’s the empty space in between that interests me the most” – Kwade
Alicja Kwade. Image by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert
“It’s the empty space in between that interests me the most,” she says with a focused, unrelenting cadence. “It begins in the atom – there’s the electron flying around and there’s the inner nucleus, but there is always this emptiness. Nobody knows what it is. That’s what I’m trying to circle around.”
Kwade is unabashed in the scope and scale of her work, and her experimentation is limited only by what she can convince others to do for her: “I’m not a big customer; I’m not ordering two hundred units of the same thing. But it’s much easier now as I’m working with eight manufacturers. They know me; they know the special things I care about.”
Her massive studio space is ripe with her spoils that are present alongside antique treasures she found while trawling flea markets and the internet. Bent mirrors wait on the floor to be rebuffed after being shipped around the world; elsewhere, a tall wooden abacus waits in turn to find a way into one of Kwade’s projects. Though there’s a line of collectors forming for each of her new pieces, there’s a longer line of artefacts waiting to be included in her work: posted beside her coffee table is a floodlight that has been stuck in standby for nearly a decade.
“I’m not a very patient person – I prefer a ‘no’ to a ‘maybe’” – Kwade
Alicja Kwade. Image by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert and from koeniggalerie.com
Even with three solo shows under her belt already in 2015 – in addition to a major upcoming show in Mannheim – Kwade is noticeably cool and relaxed during Sleek’s visit. Indeed, her rapid-fire speech is matched only by her drive for progress. She laughs decisively: “I’m not a very patient person – I prefer a ‘no’ to a ‘maybe’”.
“Medium Median” by Alicja Kwade is on display at London’s Whitechapel Gallery from 28 September until 25 June 2017
Photography by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert