Gesine Borcherdt: Your sculptures evoke the vocabulary of classic modernism: Constructivism, Suprematism, Minimalism — Aleksander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Smithson. What drew you to the forefathers of reduced form?
Katja Strunz: The reflection on modernism happened by chance, through a collage that came about during my studies in 1997. I had been working on documentation for my exhibition “Country” by cutting up all photos and copied material. Then in the evening I stuck the remaining snippets into a transparent folder. Suddenly I realized that the unintentional arrangement inside the folder looked like a Constructivist collage. I decided then to copy the collage, to obscure its origin, and now the collage looks like it could come out of an art history book.
GB: Did you then pursue a form of appropriation art?
KS: Art always has something to do with mimetic processes. My idea was to reduce the mimetic process of imitation itself, but in another form, as appropriation art has done up until now. It’s not about the exact copy of an artwork for me; it’s much more about the legacy of artworks instead, for example recollection or memory, or the establishment of a kind of Nachzeit [aftertime]. I have continued to develop this notion of ‘aftertime’ — for example in my works with old clocks.
