Photography by Patrick Tjorven Stein.
HANNAH SOPHIE DUNKELBERG’S artistic practice is hard to define. Not because it lacks symbolism – there is plenty – but because its source is not linear. Rather, it is an accumulation of observations, questions, and moments of curiosity. Sometimes these are collected as images, drawings, and especially written notes over years, until the creating begins. The creating itself, seems to be the driving signifier of her art, the force that shapes how materiality tells the story. One red line that seems to run through her practice is a lightness with which she cuts through the soft tissue of society, digging deep into what we have quietly agreed upon, or maybe just never questioned, by handing the salient questions right back to us. As much as it is about the making itself it is also a proposition of material explorations into ideologies and their manifestations, always with a twist, a glitch, another layer added with humour and style. We meet at her studio in Berlin, located in a former chocolate factory which was once the largest in the world, and as we meet on a rainy, grey winter’s day, it is hard to imagine that any sweet delights ever came from this place. In the case of the famous Sarotti-Schokolade history, that sweetness does come with a bitter aftertaste. Now the building houses numerous artist studios and has become a space for creativity, and as it happens, the aftertaste still remains due to an uncertain future, as the city’s art scene becomes more and more precarious. But for now it is holding, and the cold makes space for Hannah’s studio full of things in the making, things that have been made, and things that one day will be made.
NISHA MERIT What drives your artistic practice, which often oscillates between the abstract and the concrete?
HANNAH SOPHIE DUNKELBERG The act of creating itself, the process and encounters lead me to topics such as the tired horses or reliefs. I put something together, I carve something out, I take something apart, I’m there. Not someone else. It’s not calculated and that gives me freedom. Doing that every day seems a little crazy. Madness is when someone does the same thing over and over again and hopes for a different outcome. But the nuances in the result make it exciting. It’s a strong belief in the urgency of execution, nothing more. I’m also driven by healing through fiction. I put exhausted symbols like the monumental horses on sofas to recover from their heroic role, or turn symbols of femininity like bows and corsets into heavy metal forms – vulnerability inscribed into industrial surfaces and paint an Isa Genzken or Helen Frankenthaler BMW Art Car, even though it never existed. These are all ways of engaging with patriarchal culture. Existing systems or narratives can still be transformed as one can imagine a space in which fiction rewrites history and ornament becomes a language of autonomy. Art offers me this freedom to see the world as a construct. For me, it’s almost a matter of survival. I just became a mother, which made it even more clear how important making is to me, a attitude in a way.
NM You started with painting and then introduced more and more sculptural elements. Your mark-making seems playful and at the same time very precise which stands in contrast to the often heavy tools and industrial machines you work with. What is the process, your relationship to making and the physicality involved?
HSD I’ve always painted, built, put things together and taken them apart. I love painting, it offers so many possibilities, especially in the depiction of memory, but I find it difficult to think exclusively two dimensional – perhaps my sculptures are also constructed paintings. Sculpture is physical simply by virtue of its handling, in that moment inscribed into you and thus complementing illusion with an acute sense of temporality or spatiality – a counterpart. You can bump into it. There is a fascination with something becoming incidentally spacious, like two words suddenly forming a poem, incidental poetry. Art is always a kind of model and creates a distance, a different perspective for the viewer. The reliefs are produced using model-making techniques. In workshops, at machines, that’s where my ideas come from, through coincidences and mistakes. The process I invented to produce the reliefs also allows me to distance myself from my own work, for example. The machines are too heavy to use with precision. They are not made for drawing. There are many more layers in between than with a brush on canvas. It’s like a printing technique: every print is different; the machine does something that cannot be precisely determined. You relinquish control and thus will be surprised.
NM The materials you work with are extremely diverse, as are your themes. Where does something begin?
HSD It starts with something that already exists, not necessarily the material. Ultimately, material is not that important to me, rather states of being, man-made things. Their invention, the progress of humankind, and its dissolution – almost funny, rather tragic – like a big misunderstanding. For example, these ubiquitous naked archer sculptures cast in bronze struck me as one of these errors. Then I bought some at auction, sewed pyjamas for them, and placed them on laundry baskets in a triangle. Sometimes I don’t know what it means just yet, and that’s okay. It is a strong desire to see something in a certain way, visually and haptically, to implement what has been noted down. I write quite a lot, sometimes combining a note or sketch with one from years later, the meaning of which I have already forgotten. Our modern society is addicted to control, security, predictability. That is an illusion. The best encounter is when you can’t explain your passion for it, the one that doesn’t clearly illustrate the facts. Initially it’s about a very subjective perception, and at some point, when it’s completely calm, these tools of resistance may emerge, flirting with cuteness and decoration, something between seduction and criticism.
NM Your reliefs have this shiny and beautiful surface, but at the same time they also have this glitch moment – they charm you, and suddenly something stops unexpectedly…
HSD I’m not interested in flawless surfaces. The process is visible: marks from screws, tape, wires, glue residue – it shows the manufacturing and the machine. For me, art needs a moment when something tips over, when art remains unclear and, above all, inexplicable, otherwise you slip off – Ewa Majewska once called this “cutting through ideology.” Maybe it’s because they’re made by hand. I believe in manual production. Something flows through us and wants to be made. This closeness to the object is important, a kind of love, perhaps even disgust. There is a lot of emotion involved, but it’s not kitschy. It’s also simple, quick, not too serious. I just try things out. Maybe like painting: you make a stroke and react. I don’t know what the picture will look like in the end; it could be completely different on another day. This openness is important.