Katinka BOCK was born in 1976 in Frankfurt-on-the-Main in Germany. She lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
Whether engaging directly with the landscape or urban spaces or creating forms, objects and installations for interior spaces, Katinka Bock’s work is always linked to the context or place she is working in. She is interested in the space of the polis and the space of the political, a space defined by and for a human community, shaped by uses, symbols and history. In the interstices of these histories, she explores the personal and poetic dimension of public space, and inversely opens up the interior spaces of the sites she exhibits in by creating surprising resonances with the surrounding exterior environment. Her work is also fuelled by her interest in the social sciences, physics and mathematics. Katinka Bock presents her memories in the form of impressions, rubbings, foldings and even puddles of water on the floor of an exhibition space. As relics revealing the temporality of the creative process, her works are like witnesses to a kind of stasis or, perhaps, an internalisation of actions. Katinka Bock exposes herself to the risk of not wholly controlling how her works evolve, of not knowing which traces of the previous version will remain visible nor the ultimate form the object will take. This challenge is intrinsic to her work as any ultimate product results from multiple processes and decisions in which chance also plays a part. When a sculptor introduces (poetic, sometimes humorous) processes that more or less illustrate of her own failure, making this moment a central theme of the work, it must be apprehended as a refusal of form.
Her work has recently been exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, USA and the MAMCO in Geneva, Switzerland.