Judith Hopf

Critical text

Since the 1990s, Judith Hopf (b. 1969, Karlsruhe) has been developing an independent artistic language in the form of sculpture, video, drawing and performance. In her works, Hopf addresses social inscriptions and power structures in political and private realms and the impact of visible and invisible architectures, technology and objects on the human body and its movements. Hopf uses humour and wit to address the politics of art making, group dynamics, and the impact of technology on perception and human experience. She playfully anthropomorphizes objects such as laptop computers or ceramic vases by adding facial features, hair, arms, or legs. By animating the inanimate, she imbues it with the potential for purpose and agency. Hopf finds it particularly glaring how modern electronics creep into our bodies, so to speak. In her work, she provokes different questions: how to make things, and how to continue making those things called art in a time of intense material depletion and economical devastation on a planetary scale? What are art’s current politics of re/production, economically as well as ecologically speaking? What kind of (toxic) materials and what kind of (exploitative) structures keep that system running and what are one’s own implications in it?

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge