Judith Karcheter and Bignia Wehrli
November 13 - December 19, 2009
Schalter is pleased to announce Helen and Bright, an exhibition by Berlin-based artists Judith Karcheter and Bignia Wehrli. The exhibition presents an installation by Judith Karcheter as well as an object and a wall text by Bignia Wehrli. In addition to the exhibition, the artists will deliver a performance on Thursday, December 10th, at 8 pm.
Beneath the title Helen and Bright is a partly true, partly invented fictive tale that refers to a story that took place at the turn of the 19th century in England. The story is of a young lion tamer, Helen, and her beloved tiger, Bright. Judith Karcheter’s installation presents fragments and props which both animate the room and allow the narrative space to breath. The tale is further reinforced with photos, collages and a ballad-like song text that functions as a link between the associative fragments. The work is marked by an uneasy distinction slipping between discreet art object and theatrical prop. Karcheter’s work has been subject to numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and Europe. She studied in Glasgow and Paris before receiving her Master’s degree from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
Swiss artist Bignia Wehrli will present a wall text and an object. The work is based on twin transformations of the distance between her current home on Stettiner Straße and the apartment where she previously lived, also in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood. The variable paths between the locations are mapped out into a font, while the length of the line is knitted into an object. Wehrli’s routes form a text that is at once illustrative and illegible, tracing the invisible into a foreign language. She received her MFA at the University of Fine Arts (HfBK) in Dresden and was awarded a DAAD scholarship to China in 2005, where she spent three years.
The work of Karcheter and Wehrli is joined by an attention to, and interest in, the imaginary or imagined. Both artists employ invented histories or improvised meditations on events or the possibilities of events as a catalyst to set the work into motion. Their work draws awareness to curiosity and foregrounds absence as a productive space to be explored and transformed in different ways. Karcheter and Wehrli met in Paris in 2004; this is the first time they have shown together.
