Katalin Hausel

Artist statement

The relationship between identity construction and space has been the topic of my work for some time, in different forms.

Thinking about space is, primarily, thinking about spacial things. A room in a house, a building in a street. A railway station in a city. People and places have a complex relationship, as they mutually produce each other.

Because of the increasing actual as well as virtual mobility of our lives, a number of new tensions regarding assimilation and resistance emerge between space and individual. Could an exaggerated immersion in actual, specific details of a location result in a disturbance in the representation of space, where the person is no longer the origin of coordinates, but one point among others - a loss of self-identity? Could an exaggerated abstraction from the reality of a location result in alienation and become serious threat to society? What is the effect of the doubled perception of self-location in the construction of subjectivity? What kind of strategies or tactics are there to negotiate the emerging tension between self-forgetfulness and seeing ourselves as an "other" threatened by an unknown "I"?

I have been creating drawings, sculptures and installations that circulate around these questions, without attempting to find a final answer to them. All the work create a space, or spacial illusion, in which the viewer is invited to become the protagonist, and allow the questions emerge from the interaction with the work.