ZARBA LONSA
Form 16th October to 19th December 2015
Opening Thursday 15th October 2015, at 6 pm

During her explorations in the Quatre-Chemins neighbourhood near Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Katinka Bock was particularly struck by the number of shops located around the crossroads and surrounding streets. The diversity of businesses and the continuous flux of passers-by and local residents led the artist to set up and activate an exchange process with some of the shopkeepers. The artwork thus became the focus of a freely developed relation, unfettered by the rules and regulations of the art institution, allowing her to engage in a novel interrogation of the value, meaning and status of object exchange, including the exchange of art objects.

This project is grounded not only in the question of exchange but also in a desire to create a trajectory or flow of artworks between the street and the exhibition space, bringing into relief a key aspect of Katinka Bock’s work: the close bond between what is seen and what is not seen, between the here and the elsewhere/ home and away. This exchange is the starting point of the exhibition process and of an experience that the artists wishes to share. As with her work in general, in this project the narrative is minimal and wholly contained in the micro-shifts she creates, leaving participants free to interpret and appropriate the project as they wish. The exchanged objects then underwent a process of transformation giving rise to a new series of sculptures, an installation and a film screened across various spaces of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. 

Katinka Bock is a German-born artist living in Paris. Her projects are always produced in relation to the environment in which the work will be presented. Ever attentive to the fact that an art space generates extra-ordinary uses and experiences, she endeavours to render the elements that make for the specificity of such spaces visible by closely relating them to their surrounding context. She taps into minute elements and characteristics of the sites she engages with, building her project from the tiniest details that tend to go unnoticed, which might include anything from architectural, urban, social, climatic, temporal and spatial aspects of the site in question.

Two public readings by Katinka Bock and Clara Schulmann (art historian) have been scheduled alongside the exhibition:

Thursday 15th October 2015, 7:30 pm
Saturday 12th December 2015, 4:30 pm

The exhibition is open from Monday to Friday, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm and Saturday from 1:00 to 6:00 pm.

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In addition to this project, on the invitation of Jacob Fabricius, Katinka Bock will be presenting an installation at the Cneai in Chatou, located on the Île des impressionists (Island of Impressionists) on the river Seine. For this project, Links Mitte Rechts, the artist has used water, one of the elements surrounding the Cneai site. She has created a diversion, making the Seine river water pass from one bank to the other via the Cneai building.
You can see Katinka Bock’s Links Mitte Rechts project at the Cneai from 17th October to 5th December 2015.

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The project and the exhibition Zarba Lonsa by Katinka Bock were produced by Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers with the support of the Department de la Seine-Saint-Denis and the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles d'Ile-de-France - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication.