How are the past and history linked to our current perceptions of a place; in what way can they be activated or re-started? Is it possible to translate physical manifestations of exhaustion, which may represent social conditions in an exemplary way, into object-like forms? Questions such as these, and keywords like spatial perception and (in)visibility are central to Kama Sokolnicka’s work, in a form both playfully poetic and concentrated—artistic thinking using simple, carefully selected materials. The starting point is a fundamental interest in her environment, its history and interrelations. While her works in outside space always evolve in intense debate with the site-specific conditions, the objects shaped by minimalist aesthetics and her apparently surreal collages can be interpreted as articulating a sense of time rather unspecific, with a dark basis.
Sokolnicka’s study of the identity of place is clarified by the work ted’ (2013). By transferring the original typography of the logo of the shoe manufacturer „Bata” to the word „ted’” (now) and placing it on the former company headquarter’s roof in Zlín in the Czech Republic, the artist reflects on the transformation of the place that is representative of early social enterpreneurship. Particular sensivitiy is evidenced by those works she scattered, like fragments of romantic narrative, around Strzelecki Park in Tarnau for the exhibition Cultivating Culture in 2015. Diverse objects ranging from wind chimes in a tree top to gilt thorns took their temporary places in the landscape in an almost reticent manner. For Fence (2015), a permanently installed work, she reconstructed a section of the fence enlosing the park in isolation on an area of grass. Thus, she developed an irritation by assimilating and moving this element of local architecture—a kind of collage in space. Due to its repetition, the apparently familiar destabilizes, and at the same time we become aware of the fence’s function and boundary.
The works produced during her residency in Berlin take up the earlier series Jet Lag in their choice of material, formal language and terminology. In her exhibition in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, „Tinnitus” (2017), she is presenting four works made chiefly of brass, parts of their construction rather unstable, whose titles point to an astronomical context. Sokolnicka emphasizes that brass sometimes shows ramified microstructures—and so once again, she argues implicitly against understanding of nature and culture as opposites.