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Timaios, Katharina Kamph, 2011
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Timaios, Katharina Kamph, 2011
Exhibition
Katharina Kamph: Timaios
2 Nov 2018 – 4 Nov 2018
Event times
11 am - 7 pm
Cost of entry
Free Entry
Address
- Florastraße 61
- Berlin
Berlin - 13187
- Germany
Travel Information
- M10: Winsstraße
"What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is?" – Plato, 1892: 28
About
Katharina Kamph's Timaios serves as a direct reference to Plato, who provides the first description of the Platonic solids in the creation myth Timaios. The protagonists Timaios, Socrates, Kritias and Hermokrates philosophise about the origin of the world. In his lecture on natural philosophy, Timaios explains why the cosmos is shaped by two factors: reason and necessity. Since God must have created the cosmos optimally, the nature of the world is made up of four fundamental elements, whose ultimate symmetry and thus beauty imperatively explain their existence. Plato associates the basic forms with the four elements: tetrahedron - fire, octahedron - air, icosahedron - water, hexahedron - earth. The dodecahedron stands for the cosmos itself.
Paul Schatz, a german mathematician, artist, and inventor, discovered in 1929 that the dodecahedron can be subdivided into two star bodies and a cube-belt, more specifically into movable inverted bodies or kaleidocycles. Kamph's Timaios is shaped in the form of a kaleidocycle and filled with several tetrahedrons. Plato's question about the origin of the World is brought into the context of an artistic object conceived by Paul Schatz added with tetrahedrons, that can be turned around forever and ever.
In her works Katharina Kamph deals with fundamental questions of artistic activity. What is art and what can art do? In the invitation to fold one's own work of art, Kamph explores with Timaios the relationship between art, authorship and copyright. Her work pays homage to the D-I-Y thought, which cultivates the belief in oneself as the driving force of all change. D-I-Y promotes techniques and knowledge of self-empowerment, self-organisation and improvisation of amateurs.
(Source: Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3 (The Republic, Timaeus, Critias) (Jowett ed.) [1892] Oxford University Press, Page 28)
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Katharina Kamph
In 2010, Katharina Kamph gained her masters degree at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts and works freelance in Berlin. She expresses her mistrust in established authorities and traditional models. Kamph encourages a playful examination of geometry, philosophy and mythology. The process oscillates between repetition, imitation, appropriation and remixing. Her work extends to collaborative processes, communication and the objects of art.
