Untitled

Many of Kaabi-Linke’s works investigate the contradictions and entanglements of the innocent, tender, and ephemeral within a context of violence. In Untitled (2010), these are sought out in childhood, the root of every personal experience. Through the shadow cast by his body, the observer cannot help rendering part of the text projected onto the floor unreadable, in this way fragmenting and eradicating the biographical report on a childhood stamped with fear and violence. In order to learn of this violence, he is ‘physically’ forced to penetrate into the work, do it violence, and hence in a way repeat what has been buried in deepest memory. He reproduces a continuum of guilt, in the same way, that former children perpetrate the same injustice on their own children once inflicted on them by their parents. In this work, the motif of the inseparable intertwining of experience and destruction is concretized in various ways. The account of a damaged life is projected onto the floor as a spiral-formed text. Those wishing to read it must move in a circle so that the dizzy feeling generated by the reading doubles. The text’s end enters into a paradoxical object – a hair-nest. The nest, a place of security and warmth, is made of barbed wire matted with hair thus becoming an allegory of family-hell as a social nucleus. The new life born in such a nest easily perishes within it. That life experiences the world as a state of emergency, an experience that persists throughout its life.

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Falko Schieder: "On the Track of History." In: Tatort (2010), p. 58.