SOPHIA KÖHLER

ARTIST STATEMENT

At first glance, Sophia Köhler's art appears to be a Janus-faced affair, consisting of chatty multimedia overlaps of correspondence, publication, performance, and pedagogy on the one hand, and an ongoing drawing practice characterized by consistency and calm on the other.

These minimal drawings of interiors and landscapes prove to be notations around and through which stories of artists, writers, and friends are spun, namely through supplementary material. Hierarchical distinctions are not apparent in these categories of personal associations. The fact that the separation between art and education is not merely a diversionary tactic to be exposed in an aesthetic process of dissolution was demonstrated in the exhibition that Köhler presented on the occasion of her exam at the ADBK in an aesthetic process of dissolving art into life. Their intertwining is suppressed in her work in order to preserve the boundaries that allow the disciplines of art and education to flourish. Köhler produces intensively researched kaleidoscopic lectures that include stories and meditations on the music of Sun Ra, underground publishing, the untold feminist origins of computer science through textile manufacturing, and speculative ecological futurism, in which deeply subjective connections are made through metaphor and elective affinity. These are no less artistic than her seemingly quiet drawings, whose sensorial restraint signals the limits of explication. Nevertheless, both represent one pole in the controversial dyad of art and education. With her work, Köhler has developed a dialectic of art and pedagogy that is entirely contemporary precisely because of its refusal to allow one to dissolve into the other.

Text by Justin Lieberman (2022)