Nina Rippel, Der geflüsterte Film (Still)
Katharina Duve
My Hand Seeks the Way
From 4 April 2024
Kunsthaus foyer
Situated between the street and the exhibition space, the foyer of the Kunsthaus is a place of transition; a threshold where modes of perception shift and questions about accessibility become evident. Following on from that observation, the Hamburg-based artist Katharina Duve has designed a new work for the stairs of the space.
My Hand Seeks the Way (2024) draws on an experimental film by Nina Rippel from 1992, which deals with the richness of human sensory impressions based on the perceptual world of blind people. Quotes from Rippel’s Der geflüsterte Film (“The Whispered Film”), her text Das Nicht-Sichtbare als Evidenz – Betrachtungen einer filmischen Praxis (“The Non-visible as Evidence – Reflections on a Cinematic Practice”) as well as poetic reflections by Katharina Duve herself were flocked onto eight seating elements made from felt in Braille and black letter. Thus, the work invites people with and without visual impairments to engage in an exchange about the complexity of perception through touch. Because not seeing does not mean perceiving less, but rather referring to an alternative spectrum of perceptions.
Katharina Duve (*1980, Schwerin, GER) works in the fields of film, costume and performance. She is part of the filmmakers’ group Auge Altona, a collaborator of the music group Deichkind and a member of the performance collective geheimagentur. Since 2022, she has been a professor of Time-based Media at HAW Hamburg. Her artistic works have been shown at the Falckenberg Collection (2023), the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (most recently in 2022), the Tate Modern, London (2017) and Brut, Vienna (2017), among others. She lives and works in Hamburg.