Although Katharina Karrenberg's artistic practice is undoubtedly based immediately after her highly politicized consciousness.

Although Katharina Karrenberg's artistic practice is undoubtedly based immediately after her highly politicized consciousness, she disagrees with the division between political and nonpolitical art. For her, art is always conditioned through the politics of seeing and the politics of representation. In most numerous of her earlier pieces, Karrenberg directly addressed societal tensions. at producing images--installations and "picture-objects"--she makes visible the invisible conflicts and tensions that constitute everyday experience. still she proffers neither their reconciliation nor their sublation in her work. In the wall installation Volker ohne Raume (People without rooms/space, 1991)--part of the arrange show "Heimat" (Homeland) in 1991--Karrenberg dealt with the German past and the East German everyday existing The installation Feeding the Art classification I, 1992, focused on the world-wide question of starvation and the German multicultural not absent In the work Feeding the Art theory II, 1992, installed in Eastern Berlin, she addressed the art combination of parts to form a whole the acute tensions of the East- and West-Germany dialogue, and the Western "soft colonization" of the East with art, hers included.

If in the brace most recent installations her approach appear to beed more oblique, it is because she bypassed as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but pictorial and iconic representation. None of the sum of two units works contained images; they were made up of sentences She refused here to furnish materialized images as she did in her "picture-objects." In Standbein recht Spielarm links (Standing leg right playing arm left 1992) Karrenberg used a thesis to speak about art, cultivation and politics. This installation was, in fact, about another unrealized installation that initially dealt with the image of femininity as it is invented by art history, literature, philosophy, and the mass media. Now, Karrenberg intends to examine the ideology of representing the female corpse and femininity as it appeared in the sculptural work, The Judgement of Paris, 1941 by way of a Nazi sculptor, Josef Thorak. In the same part of her not-yet realized installation, she plans to replace three female statues from Thorak's work with a living chisel of three black men while the other part deals with issues of contemporary racism.

The fragmented paragraph presented in this show was divided into about 200 "pages" and placed forward gray empty slipcases installed in a rigid horizontal uproar The exhibition space was poorly lit, stressing the intentionally austere, equal dry, visual character of the piece. The "broken" thesis wandered from ecriture feminine to science fiction, economics to nature, private memory to philosophy, world politics to the view from the window. It touched forward the market and the function of the art theory artistic production, media, and color theory. The backbone of this writing was, however, Karrenberg's reflection upon Germany's political past and at hand National Socialism and its esthetics, contemporary right radicalism, skinheads, xenophobia, patriarchy, sexism, and violence.

The visual impact of the installation Salzlecken (Salt stiffen 1992), was completely different. Karrenberg used material associated with "female domesticity." The text--an apocalyptic narrative--was written in salted white dough and ariseed where the wainscoting had been previously fitted. The white writing onward the white wall contrasted with a dark vision of deconstruction that was emphasized at the comic-strip like endings of each decision ("splash," "crash," "boom").

Karrenberg allude tos that political art today is not and cannot be made on an optimist. An optimist, as the aphorism states, is nothing however a badly informed pessimist. It goe without saying that a political artist has to be in a strict sense informed about the world we live in.

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