I Must Sleep, Please!

About

What drives us as children to separate ourselves from the world? When and how do we begin to distinguish the other from ourselves? How in adulthood do we relive that initial lack of distinction that characterises the first months of life?

Artistic creativity is one of these moments, in which the interplay between subject and object appears to be fused and cohesive. But it is also in the precariousness of life around us that the artist finds that primordial thread. The precarious circumstances of the homeless, the shelters they build to take refuge in, their seeing without being seen and their human condition – these allow the German artist to trace out a path from her installation that involves photography and assemblage. Here too, Kutter's work shows a form of resistance to spectacularising or showcasing our lives, going beyond the appearance presented, subverting expectations and prompting fertile interpretative concerns that involve the observer.

Susanne Kutter's art unveils the ambivalence of seeing and its conventions, and it does so by eluding these mechanisms; at the same time, with playful mischief and cutting irony, it reveals the true nature of architectural concepts and spatial solutions, making us realise that they are vehicles of authoritarianism or devices of control.

Through this work, the artist questions individual and collective codes of behaviour, encompassing psychological intimacy, processes of media distortion and interpretative eccentricities.

SUSANNE KUTTER was born in Wernigerode in what was then East Germany in 1971. In 1982, she fled to West Germany with her family. She took German studies at the University of Münster and studied sculpture and video under Paul Isenrath and Guillaume Bijl at Münster University of Fine Arts. The University of Fine Arts awarded her the Förderpreis, a prize for the most promising young artists, during her studies. She also received a stipend from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to reside at the Cité des Arts in Paris, as well as spending several months in New York and California on a German Academic Exchange (DAAD) study programme. She was awarded an MA with distinction at the Münster University of Fine Arts in 2000.

Susanne Kutter works across a variety of different media and formats, including installation, performance, sculpture, photography and video. Her work is often concerned with the catastrophic relationship between nature and culture and the loss of safety and intimacy in everyday life. Within this context she reflects on the changing role of women in western societies during the last few decades and the increasing disappearance of the middle classes, traditionally associated with educational and cultural values. Susanne Kutter has twice received funding from the Film - und Medienstiftung NRW, a foundation to promote film and media, for her video works Flooded Home and Die Zuckerdose (The Sugar Bowl) and in 2017 she was awarded a working stipend by the Stiftung Kunstfonds in Bonn, a state-funded organization to promote artists based in Germany. She has taught at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and at Bauhaus University in Weimar. She has lived with her family in Berlin since 2002.