Sara Masüger
For each visitor to an exhibition, there are distinct expectations and charms that accompany the visit: children, experts, art lovers and culture vultures, journalists, scientists and artists – the audience takes in the presentation of the collection and exhibits with differing degrees of concentration. It is not possible for the exhibition venue to measure or record the spontaneous reactions inside the exhibition as people respond to the concept, the works displayed, the lighting, the exhibition architecture and the other visitors. The Swiss artist Sara Masüger records precisely these nuances and emotions – and sometimes also platitudes, spontaneous outbreaks of feeling or professional evaluations – writing them down in an individual text. In a very complex process, she uses clay to write the resulting text on a wall. Over time, the letters gradually dry out, eventually falling apart and crumbling from the support surface. What remain are the impressions and outlines left on the wall and the broken fragments of clay on the ground. This wall relief, in its transience and fragility, also references her sculptural work, in which abstract or figurative forms are subject to processes of transformation, even to the point of dissolution.
For her work at the Akademie der Künste, Masüger visited the exhibition Sound and Silence at Kunstmuseum Bonn: the show, which was put on to mark the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, ran from 27 May to 5 September 2021. The exhibition revolved around the question of how contemporary art makes silence visible and audible, taking special account of the fact that silence and stillness are only ever conceivable in relation to sound.
Anke Hervol
In the exhibition:
Sara Masüger
Kunstmuseum Bonn, 19. Juni 2021, 2021
Wall piece made of clay
Courtesy of the artist
