Zora Janković, Zuzanna Skiba
curated by Karen Linnenkohl

We are all constantly moving. In order to achieve something, we have to take action. Action is always associated with setting, placing, laying. A material is taken, used or deformed and changed until it meets the requirements of our understanding of order and has found its place, its space. With the order comes habits – you “live” in the created spaces and adjust to your habits. When habits and traditions become too constrictive, one tends to look for a way out, an escape. It is therefore important to plan for interruptions and openness; it is important to give rooms a good rhythm.
Taking place in the artist-run-space SCOTTY, the exhibition shows the striking ways in which Berlin-based artists Zuzanna Skiba and Zora Janković have arranged their respective material into surprising and rhythmic spaces.
The large drawing by Zuzanna Skiba is particularly striking in terms of rhythm. Small, parallel strokes result in thickened drawings, which, in their manifold whorls and loops, evoke spaces that seem to reach out rhythmically into the third dimension. If they end surprisingly at one point on the page, it is only to continue ad infinitum at another. Born in Poland, Skiba (b.1968) studied drawing and painting in Bielefeld, Groningen (NL) and at the UdK Berlin. However, she owes the hatching, with which she uses small strokes to create a painterly flow of utopian spaces, to earlier training as a cartographer. Such stroke sequences are used when drawing maps in order to be able to distinguish between mountains and flat terrain. Skiba has captured spatial conditions from a bird’s-eye view and transferred to her artistic work.

Zora Janković (b. 1978), who comes from Slovenia and trained as a sculptor in Venice, Rome, and at the KHB Weißensee in Berlin, takes up the rhythm used to alienate the premises with the magical spatial situation of her small black-and-white photograph. In the small photo, one recognizes again and again new spatial situations in shades of black, white and gray without being able to make out an actual spatial proportion. Her two exhibited sculptures, which come from the Architect series (2015-2017), are also composed of rhythmic volumes. These are concrete sculptures in which cubic bodies are joined together or on top of one another, and their special feature is their cracked surface structure. It gives the sculpture openness and, thus, its very own rhythm.