Sabine Kacunko’s installation VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) (2013) depicts the three phases of a process of decay that simultaneously generates new life and directly references the artist’s own creative process. The image in the central section originates from the Vision-installation, realized in 2009 at the Total Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and the Charité in Berlin: a photographic negative of a human skull—eaten away by bacteria—was captured by a digital network camera and transmitted live from the Charité in Berlin to the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul via a connected monitor. The initially recognizable motif underwent various stages of organic, chemical-material, and formal-aesthetic destruction and abstraction before—breaking out of the technological “closed loop” of the live transmission—it assumed the form of a microscopic “snapshot” in the central section of VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR). Yet the source motif, transformed in this aesthetic manner, did not exit the material and medial cycle; instead, it was fed back into a manual creative process: the front side of VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) – at once the most visible and the most “abstract”—encapsulates this processual nature by filling the surface disruption (an engraving representing the emergence of new life, specifically fungal growth) with ceramic enamel. The three superimposed panels—front, center, and back—illustrate and bear witness to the transformation of motif and metaphor, material and medium, and conception and perception. Together, they also form a surface for projection—a “portable altar”—for rapidly evolving concepts of “life.”
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VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) represents a logical continuation of the artist’s photographic and videographic ”natura morta e viva” works, a trajectory that has been evolving—most explicitly since her large-format photograph Schädel [Skull] (1997). Thus, the “artificial” enters into a dialogue with the “natural,” wherein the content and meaning—the “living” essence of art—contrast with the motif from nature that appears formally “dead,” while simultaneously finding a continued existence within it. The “pre-scientific, bizarre” quality that has run like a common thread through Sabine Kacunko’s photographic “collecting” since the 1990s shared significant affinities with the aesthetic and epistemological potentials—often overlooked in terms of their significance—of the “cabinets of art and curiosities” (Kunst- und Wunderkammern) of the 16th to 18th centuries. The “three kingdoms” of nature represented there—the vegetal, animal, and mineral—were mirrored in the artist’s installations, variously represented and freely interpreted through motifs such as the lily and the feather, the fish, or the wild boar skull. By contrast, man—the “crown” of the natural realm—remained largely invisible in the artist’s recent repertoire of motifs; yet his omnipresence becomes all the more palpable in her often startling photographs and video images, manifesting itself between the “morbid” and the “flourishing” aspects of her subjects—often in close-up shots that “individualize” details and liberate them from their familiar contexts.
VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) bears witness to this human omnipresence without explicitly depicting it; instead, it reveals the results of a process of decay that simultaneously generates new life. The negative of a barren human skull—resembling the lunar surface and eaten away by fungi and bacteria—is a recurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre; it appears to delve ever deeper into the dimensions of the skull’s biological and medial death, without ever seeking to reach absolute zero. By populating the negative of her brilliantly photographed artwork with pathogenic microorganisms—here, for the first time, of human origin—Sabine Kacunko not only points to the factual and symbolically charged cycle of life and death but also reveals, in a striking manner, the resilient substance of which art can be made when it assumes such profound significance in the lives of its visionaries.
Linking the open-ended surface of the images to the evolution of art and media history is arguably the most illuminating approach to interpreting VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) and Sabine Kacunko’s body of work as a whole. The impossibility of penetrating the surface of her images to reach the subject matter itself inevitably raises questions regarding the meaning and significance of the (re)presented processes of formation and decay inherent in photographic, videographic, and digital imagery. Art-historical cross-references to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist dialectic of concept and perception are particularly relevant here—such as the distinctive aesthetic appeal of the “patina” effect, which softens hard contours while simultaneously veiling them—as are various artistic motifs that point to further art-historical continuities in the underlying lines of inquiry.
VISION (PORTABLE ALTAR) also reflects the artistic-philosophical, (medical-)scientific, and broader cultural significance of Sabine Kacunko’s “bacteria art.” This work draws upon the seemingly contradictory perspectives these spheres hold regarding the question of “life.” In her installations and other artistic projects spanning the last two decades, the artist articulates a necessary “macro-view”—mediated through photography and video—of microorganisms; these entities embody the characteristics of “living matter” like few others known to us. The aim is not to replace a physically or religiously determined paradigm with a biological one, but rather to cultivate a perspective and sensibility for the universal within the particular and the particular within the universal—an endeavor for which a highly differentiated scientific and institutional worldview offers insufficient means.
