Kristina Buch
EXECUTION SEMANTICS for a necessary criminal
05.06. – 31.07.2016

Kristina Buch (*1983) has already had an impressive path for her relatively short artistic career. It is relatively short because she studied biology and Protestant theology before beginning her studies at the Royal College of Art in London. But even during her art studies, most recently as a master student of Rosemarie Trockel at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, she took part in group exhibitions at home and abroad, for example in 2010 at the German Embassy in London or the Schmela Haus in Düsseldorf. Participation in international art biennials followed, for example in 2012 at the Parallel Events of Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium and in the same year as the youngest participant at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, before completing her studies in 2013. In the same year she was given an assistant professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. She had previously given readings at Imperial College in London. In 2015 she became a guest lecturer at the Basel School of Art and Design and was the only German artist represented at the 14th Istanbul Biennale.

This subjective and incomplete list shows that Kristina Buch’s understanding of art is in tune with the times, albeit in a syncopated way. This is surprising at first glance in our superficial and fast-moving world, because her works are not superficial and quickly readable, in the sense of quickly consumable. But they do not appear unapproachable either. On the contrary. Above all, however, they stand out in the context of art. This may be due to the animals that play a role in some of her works, or to the works of which one sometimes does not even know whether they ever actually existed or whether they are just fictions carefully discussed by the international art press. However, it is essentially the precision in dealing with the context, with the familiar, the usual and the environment in which her works enter this world and repeatedly pull what we boldly call reality out of our pockets like pickpockets. Observing the obvious and breaking it down precisely and in a complex way through small interventions, without falling into the rhythm of the world or one’s own predictable rhythm, is something special in today’s fast-paced, hawkish times.

As a Bremerhaven scholarship holder, Kristina Buch has taken a work she has been working on since 2012 to its next chapter with her exhibition EXECUTION SEMANTICS for a necessary criminal for the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven and woven it inseparably into the situation she found in the Kunsthalle. A chicken may suddenly be a spiritual curtain, decapitations of words and other things take the place of assertions and the heads of a word are found cryptically multiplied in passing, woven into a jacquard wardrobe curtain, in which weaving, as the origin of binary systems laid by women, in the uncovering and concealing of threads, in a switching on and off, anticipating the zeros and ones of the digital world, comes to light like a necessary, formative and rhythmic censorship. And with a mixture of totemic intensity, a struggle with the ‘speechable’ and the abstract and yet ‘inhabitable’ formal language that emerges from it, which shifts to new openings in front of the wardrobe of our customs, Kristina Buch ultimately lets us stand in the wide space in front of the supposed nothingness, of which we do not know in a different way this time whether what we see perhaps only conceals that which seems to forever elude our concepts and our understanding and yet wants to be recognized.

Curated by Klaus Becké.