Katja Mater

Critical text

Katja Mater (b. 1979, Hoorn) is a co-founder of the independent magazine Girls Like Us and a visual artist. She is interested in parameters of perception, employing different optical supports and proceeding by way of translation from drawing to photography, from photography to installation and to film, in a game of exchanges that reach the point of annulling their differences. The artist documents and records these fleeting moments of transition and transformation. Her practice sets out to reveal non-binary aesthetics and poetics, linking back to notions of heterogeneity, the double, the inversion, the fluidity and a non-linear conception of time. The series of works Time is an Arrow (2020) consists of a set of 79 images of clocks, made during the first wave of the pandemic, from March to May 2020. Conceived in keeping with a game of false symmetry and metamorphosis, starting with the drawing of one half of an analogue clock photographed in natural light, each work in the series reveals two identical but distinct faces that form an entire clock through subtle variations of colours and indications of numbers, in which the 12 becomes 10, the 11 becomes 7, and so on. The artist suggests an alternative temporality based on imprecision and uncertainties that defeat the mechanical permanence of our everyday haste, like the cadence of the tick-tock of the alarm clock of Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit.

Text by Lilou Vidal