Dear Sides
When your right hand touches your left hand they are both subject and object of touch, an alternating ambiguous sensation flipping you back and forth between the two. There is a similar fundamental reversibility between seeing and being seen, a shared participation between the seer and the visible, between observer and object.
*Maurice Merleau-Ponty
When things looked at return your gaze, they can perhaps also subtly offer you different ways in which they allow themselves to be seen. Suggesting an exchange between object and subject, from obverse to reverse, a mise en abyme of sight. And would the same apply when it comes to the act of reading and looking at words?
Dear Sides is a new film installation that is generously lending its name to the constellation of new pieces that Katja Mater will be showing at P/////AKT;
“I live in a text driven world with a severely dyslectic brain. Because of my dyslexia it often feels like things can flip around, and do, while it does not make that much of a difference to me. I can read almost as fast up-side-down as right-side-up. Left to right or right to left.
Why is it that dyslectics flip their letters, their numbers, follow their own logic and invent their own ways? People with dyslexia do not naturally process written words or take on tasks in a linear manner, they do not work their way from left to right or top to bottom. They tend to approach the world in a more visual way and take in word as shapes from all angles. While writing, they “draw a picture using letters” and orientation does not seem that important.”
As a result, one could say, Mater is essentially interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, recording events that simultaneously can and also cannot be, holding midway between information and interpretation. One way of doing this is by creating hybrids between photography or film with other media, where their interaction is blending and binding them together, where they behave as one but at the same time reveal each other’s distinctive qualities and glitches.
For Mater, time is both tool and material, and her work process (much related to painting) a mediation of time, which she squeezes into a single image. Entangled multiplied or shuffled, performed and recorded, while being counterbalanced with our perception, our understanding and our expectations of both.
In memory of Ruud Molleman — While working on this exhibition I lost a friend and mentor. Ruud helped me to realize many 16 mm film works by specially inventing and building new tools and methods not rarely out of the ordinary. He has been a huge support for me and my work over the years, always open to go off the beaten path. Thank you for all your trust, help and patience, I will miss you deeply.
Very special thanks to Alice Versieux, Seab Deuling, Byrthe Lemmens, Kato
Six, Jessica Gysel and Erwin van ‘t Hart .
