Reconnecting Memories

Pick up a handful of sand on the beach and you are holding rock that water and wind have ground down over a long span of time. Salt remains when seawater evaporates, and wax keeps the imprint of the hand that shaped it. Every material carries a memory. The sculptor Ilona Kálnoky works with this memory of materials, and our gallery presents her latest works under the title reconnecting memories.

It all began with ceramics. Born in Styria, Austria, in 1968, Kálnoky first learned this craft, in which clay takes on its final form only in the fire. She went on to study at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee with Karin Sander and Bernd Wilde. Today she lives in Berlin and in the Uckermark region. She co-founded the UM Festival for contemporary art, music and literature and is involved there in school projects on art and biodiversity. In her work, she gives the material room. Sand, salt, wax, plaster, lava and glass, often raw materials that do not seem valuable at first glance, are exposed to processes that can only partly be controlled. Her sculpture sketches are experimental set-ups in which material, action and process come together. From this, in the artist’s words, emerges “an encyclopaedia of the sculptural, in which the space in between takes on a special significance.” She presents the objects in a shelving system or turns them into photo editions.

This encyclopaedia includes words such as wave-suspend-continue, flood-open-breath and gather-swell-expand. Kálnoky’s titles read like instructions: they name processes. In this, they follow in the footsteps of Richard Serra. In 1967 and 1968, the American sculptor wrote down a list of 84 verbs such as to roll, to fold and to spill, adding contexts such as of gravity and of entropy. He described this Verb List, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Kálnoky’s relief of time #1 sounds like its continuation, and it names the theme around which the entire exhibition revolves: time.

Time becomes visible in the salt works. In wave-suspend-continue and flood-open-breath, glass, wax and salt lie in Plexiglas cases, gather-swell-expand combines plaster, salt and wax, and of time #1 ceramic and salt. None of these four works is finished. Their dates end with a dash after the year, 2021 or 2026, and that dash remains open: the works carry on for as long as they exist.

How far this idea can reach is shown by a work in central Germany. Since 5 September 2001, the organ piece ORGAN²/ASLSP by the American composer John Cage, “As Slow As Possible”, has been sounding in St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt. It is set to last 639 years, until 2640. On 5 August 2026 the sound changed for the 17th time, and the next change will follow on 5 October 2027. Kálnoky’s salt works share an attitude with Cage’s composition: the work is a process, and each of us experiences only a section of it.

Some of Kálnoky’s works survive only as photographs. Two of these photo editions are part of the exhibition, Latex and Sand, fine art prints on etching paper, each comprising nine motifs in an edition of eight.

With sand, we arrive at the memory the title promises. The American land artist Robert Smithson, known for his Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, wrote in Artforum in 1968 of mind and earth as “in a constant state of erosion”, a landscape in which “mental rivers wear away abstract banks.” Sand, quartz sand and lava sand are such deposits, and in the series reconnecting memories they become images. On a sheet of paper, lava sand gathers into a small cloud. Glass panes with sand and quartz sand lean on two shelves. Kálnoky applies sand directly onto one of the gallery walls.

This wall leads back to her teacher. For her Wall Pieces (Wandstücke), Karin Sander sands and polishes a section of wall until it reflects. The image is created by removing material. One such work has been permanently installed at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach since 1992, and the series has also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kálnoky reverses the gesture. She adds a minimum of material to the wall.

We live in a time when images flash across our screens by the second. One has vanished before the next appears, and there is hardly any room left for what lies in between. Kálnoky’s works set a different measure against this pace. Salt and sand settle at their own speed, and those who stop in front of them win this space back.

At the end stands the space in between. In 1968, the American artist Bruce Nauman cast the space beneath his chair. The British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, who in 1993 became the first woman to win the Turner Prize, took the idea further from the 1990s onwards, casting the empty spaces beneath chairs and tables. Both make the in-between solid. Kálnoky leaves it open. Her standing sculptures are conceived in pairs: two bodies of plaster, lava and lacquer on slender rods, and the offene doppelkonus (open double cone) in silver-plated plastic. Air remains between them, and it is precisely there that the connections the title speaks of are made.

In this way, reconnecting memories becomes a walk through the memory of materials, from the single verb to the deposit of sand to the empty space between two bodies. We warmly invite you to take this walk yourself.