Enlarging Space by Minimising It
Sabine Schaschl
Work by the Zurich-born artist Ana Strika explores questions of perception. She analyses the processes of seeing, thinking and feeling that arise from our dialogue with art, tracking ideas as they form, change and dissolve. When Strika took up her residency at the ZF Kunststiftung in Friedrichshafen, she brought with her a set of materials, the core resources of her art. These include cardboard components, pieces of wood and small objects made from modelling clay or papier mâché that Strika had integrated into earlier installations, as well as photographs and drawings of previous works. Her modular materials establish a tonal spectrum of brown, to which she adds paper of various colours and designed objects in shades of pink reminiscent of pale skin and carnal flesh. Strika’s materials are the perfect accessories for fluctuating circumstances and answer her need for flexibility because these basic shapes can always be enlarged, complemented and renewed. When she was preparing for the ZF Kunststiftung show at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, the artist incorporated cardboard boxes awaiting roadside collection. After the show they were re-inserted into the suspended process of recycling.
Starting with a mood board, the artist formulates questions in response to site-specific contexts and spatial features. The residency, lasting several months, provides a compact studio and an equally compact apartment in the tower of the former reception unit built in Bauhaus style for the harbour station, as well as the opportunity to exhibit in the ZeppLab, a space of about 60 m². From the outset, then, the smallness of the rooms was a defining theme. Other research ideas related to such topics as density, ordering and combining, reproductions, ways of seeing, layers of space, layers of time and realms of experience.
Other factors here were Strika’s engagement with present-day artists such as Laure Prouvost, Geoffrey Farmer and Sarah Sze, and her investigation of references from art history. Strika quotes, for example, the reproduction of a model stage set created by Vladimir Tatlin for Khlebnikov’s 1923 play Zangezi, which she had come across at the Theater Museum in Vienna. This design was one of the last that can still be ascribed to Tatlin’s Painterly Reliefs period, marking his progress as he let go of the wall and branched out into space. “In these objects Tatlin investigated the material and its behaviour (tension, pressure etc.) and this gave him an idea of its faktura, that is, the artistic form […] reflected in the properties of the material.”¹ The way the material helps to determine the ultimate form and its potential to capture the space was an important focus for Tatlin’s explorations. For Strika, too, it provides input for the form-finding process.
The thematic research proceeds alongside the first three-dimensional experimental settings. Allowing wiggle room for movement, Strika filled her temporary studio almost chockfull with supported tabletops made of honeycomb board. Gradually the artist tested different formal compositions, always associated with the form of a building. “From the start I was guided by the leftover materials and didn’t cut anything. I tried to build with them, and in my mind it was always a nesting of parts, a Potemkin construct.”²
From the outset, the darkness of the prospective exhibition venue contributed to her thinking, as did the potential for lighting and the shadows it would create. Over the months, many different volumetric compositions and pictorial motifs took shape in the studio. Paperboard and pulpboard layered one behind the other and at different angles, the motif of the bamboo stick against a wall, leaning ladders, window-like frames and scaffold-like structures – all of them were pre-conceived in the studio. Interlacing spaces, misshapenly round apertures, walls broken open and spatial moments reminiscent of public squares also find their way into the model scenarios. In the course of design, the handmade shapes, the leftover materials and selected real objects, such as nutshells, acorns and a glass bowl, are arranged within a relationship, packed closer together and then thinned out again.
This vital process of careful review and selection is what the artist calls airing. “The components for the installations are part of an experimental repository, rather like a prop store or a museum depot, from which isolated objects keep being fetched to the stage, to the show space,” she says of her work process, adding: “A central component […] is change and playing around with various settings.”³ This playing around is recorded by Strika in drawings and photographs, generating options of returning to something previous at another point. “In my artistic practice I am interested in the question of how mental processes come about, how they morph, how thoughts take shape, materialise and disperse again. I approach that question in installations by putting together filigree materials like intricate branches and pieces of paper in ever-changing constellations, seeking to create what you might call making-of scenarios of perception, thought and remembering.”⁴
“I like it,” continues the artist, “when objects remain in a volatile state. I am interested in that intermediate unfinished state. Malleable like memory. The at times unbearable equipoise between possibilities before a decision is taken, which always entails ruling out so many options. Our thoughts are constantly becoming. The only constant factor is change.”⁵
The exhibition at the ZeppLab is indicatively titled DIE VORSTELLUNG, which in German means both a stage performance and our personal power of imagination. This title also contains a self-referential nod, in both senses, to the artist and her work. The rectangular form of the stage, which served in the studio as a basis for her experimental arrangements, was transformed for the exhibition display into an organic form characterised by convex and concave curves, evoking an impression that we are physically present on the stage, a being in the installation. The well-tried table character and the general table height were kept for DIE VORSTELLUNG, although the surface is covered now with black papers. The artist uses spotlights to carefully pick out various stage sets, while other places, as if modelling a painting, are deliberately darkened. “When we enter a dark room, we move differently, our body state is different,”⁶ observes Strika. Depending on our height, we look straight ahead or from a slightly higher angle at these various spaces, images and motifs.
As we consider the installation, our visual perception and mental imagination seem to vie with each other: hardly has the eye spotted what seems to be a corner than we begin to imagine what might be lurking there. The ladders draw our gaze upwards, only to vanish into darkness. A misshapenly round aperture in one of the walls is not a mirror; the scaffold-like motif frames pieces of paper on one side only, not on the others. Memories of falling leaves and of trees that no longer bear foliage arise. Motifs recur again and again, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, sometimes back to front. In another scene, two little spheres are poised uncertainly on a miniature box pushed up against the wall, while at the opposite wall a bigger sphere with a textured surface visually cements its steadfast quality.
The artist demonstrates how quickly varying details can prompt new readings and interpretations. Soon our perception stumbles across other scenes, such as those where objects from the real world again challenge our perceptive faculties. An ordinary glass bowl, for example, seems to be full of liquid, but upon closer scrutiny this turns out to be an imitation. The dark film that created that appearance is aligned to a different horizon from that of the adjacent scenes. Reality meets imitation meets imagination. Everything is shifting back and forth in our perception. Seeing a thing is no guarantee that it is real. The smallness of each separate motif accounts for much of this imaginary mind play. As the esteemed French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once commented in his book The Poetics of Space, the more cleverly we miniaturise the world, the better we possess it; and he adds: “values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.”⁷ Strika means this power of the small when she says: “I miniaturised the space and that made it bigger.”⁸
She makes use of the various phenomena of perception and can fill any surface and any stage with material-form actors to evoke unforeseen plots. Or she can make a theme out of an empty stage and a waiting state, as she demonstrated in her exhibition Eins nach dem anderen (One Thing at a Time) at Museum Haus Konstruktiv in pandemic year 2021. In that show the actors, the various elements in the installation, were placed on stand-by. They leant against walls, clustered around the transition zones by entrances to the space and left the space itself to take centre stage. In both exhibitions the artist interacts artfully with our power of imagination, making the small big and the big small, shifting the centre outwards or the outside into the centre. Losing our way in Strika’s worlds remains a pleasure.
1 Dmitrii Dimakov, Vladimir Tatlin’s Reliefs, in the catalog Tatlin – new art for a new world, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012, p. 99, translated from German by Kate Vanovitch.
2 Ana Strika in an interview with the author, 7 November 2024.
3 Ana Strika in an unpublished text about her work Eins nach dem anderen for the Spotlights to accompany the exhibition Reset at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, 2021.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ana Strika in an interview with the author, 7 November 2024.
7 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 150.
8 Ana Strika in an interview with the author, 7 November 2024.
