Cornelia Konrads

My work is focused on site-specific installations for public and private spaces - they can be indoors or outdoors, temporary or permanent.

A reflection of the site and its particularities is always my starting point. So each work is developed in a close dialogue with the architecture, topography, vegetation and history of the surrounding area.

I understand the site not as a background, but as a texture. The goal is, that my work becomes a part of this texture – in the end, it should be unclear if it has always been there, if it will stay, change or disappear in the next second. The situation is ambivalent: Are the elements falling or rising? Dancing or fighting? Is this a downfall or a victory? Both alternatives are conceivable at the same time.

The questions I put in my work deal a lot with the perception of time and movement– often my installations appear as if a film has stopped for a moment– a moment of “frozen time”.

I’m intrigued by this transient thing, called “moment” or “presence” – the intangible rupture between past and future. Consequently I try to create a moment of irritation, by adding an element to the scenery, which refuses to fit into the expected order. If something doesn’t behave as it should, within the twinkling of an eye the inner monologue gets interrupted. One “arrives here and now”, in a mysterious world, where strange things (including oneself) have a unique meeting. For this moment of irritation I like to challenge what is supposed to be “reliable”: the laws of gravity, the solidity of walls or the ground under our feet.

As once a viewer has put it very well: there is always a moment of catastrophe in my work -as well as a moment of humour.