Sarah Pichlkostner: KUY "I wanna know what will happen tomorrow?" KAY, was still walking
After her presentation in The Bakery in 2015, Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to host the second solo show by Austrian artist Sarah Pichlkostner, KUY "I wanna know what will happen tomorrow?" KAY, was still walking.
The show at Annet Gelink Gallery may be read as the last chapter of a long-term research by Sarah Pichlkostner, focused on the representation of time, space, self-optimization, productivity, self-reflection and empathy created by objects. Through a deep study of the behaviour of materials, that combines effortless contemporary methods with laborious and outmoded fabrication techniques, Pichlkostner reflects on the social behaviour of and towards objects. The title refers to the artist's last expedient, in which she developed the characters of KAY and KUY, an imaginary pair of protagonists: KAY describes a character who got developed through selfoptimizing apps, while KUY is the emotional part of it.
Pichlkostner often refers to her works as settings, in which different elements become characters in a dialogue with the space, each other and the viewer. Trying to perfect the object in its function, our relationship with it is questioned. In this self-optimizing perspective which we are continuously pushed to, what would it mean for an object to be more productive? Time is experienced only as a race to the promised optimization, postponing the realization of the self to an idyllic future-time. Only when facing its counterpart KUY as an emotional mirror, KAY can experience a full presence in the ‘now-time’. Can eventually an object fall in love? Productivity converges with emotion, calling us viewers to wonder if it’s the object we’re looking at or rather ourselves.
These two figures merge together in KUY: "I wanna know what will happen tomorrow?" KAY, was still walking, as two faces of the same persona, so that the installation can be seen as a whole in which the two characters represent two points of perspective. Tension due to this longing to perfection is endured under the promise to fly to the moon - as metaphor for a better world.
Sarah Pichlkostner creates a setting in which the objects seem about to fail but they are trying their best not to: a freezed moment where the time collapse corresponds to an emotional collapse and the promise of a speculative future becomes aimless as in Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’.
As the artist stated: “When material is brought to an object, i.e. is made into one, and the function of this object is continuously developing over time, then the object is ultimately reflecting us.”
