Deborah Schamoni

The creative work of Judith Hopf (born in Karlsruhe in 1969, residing in Berlin) has been known to a broad audience at the latest since her participation in the dOCUMENTA (13). Her art deals with stories and aesthetics, turned towards the sphere of everyday life. For it, she uses forms of expression like performance, video, sculpture and graphics.

At the same time, Judith Hopf‘s view of social processes is a decidedly offbeat one: For her, it is expressly not about the direct depiction of social and political facts in the medium of art. Instead, she makes use of art as an autonomous space within which the status quo can be shaken up. For especially by her work demanding aesthetic autonomy, it gains the chance to speak around current discourse in a productive way. Slapstick, comedy, and caricature serve as her means of provoking gaps and holes in the order of things, which allows the practiced routines of interpretation to be derailed—be they of a political or aesthetic nature.

Within her sole exhibition in the Kunsthalle Lingen, Judith Hopf realizes new installation art adapted to the specific conditions of the location. It bears the metaphorical title “A Line May Lie” and presents, among other things, objects that, in their abstraction, are reminiscent of the flat horizon that characterizes western Lower Saxony, in addition to her work on paper and textual work on the wall.

Text: Kunsthalle Lingen
Photos: Kunsthalle Lingen