Sabine KuehnleStories from the North

“Axe-time, sword-time, shields are cloven, wind-time, wolf-time, until the world goes down …” The murmured vision of the seeress in the Nordic song of the “Edda” concerns a mighty world of legend, mighty above all in words. Sabine Kuehnle gives it form in an expansive installation, leading us to the ash tree Yggdrasill, which in Norse mythology represents the entire cosmos. Its crown joins heaven and earth, its roots reach far down to a spring beside which three maidens live. They determine our fate; their names are: that which has become, that which is becoming and that which is to come. Sabine Kuehnle lets them take effect, so that they can combine with other impressions, figures, images and stories and so that new narratives and spaces open up. The path towards this at times resembles precise scholarly research and then again proceeds purely associatively. The separation between concentrated search and free drifting is suspended; the conscious and the unconscious are to flow into one another. To combine and work materials, textures and space in such a way that they have the effect of a poem: like a condensed thought, clever, raw, clear and sometimes hard – therein lies the particular quality of Sabine Kuehnle’s works.