Käthe Kruse

Ich sehe

Schlagzeilen und Tonspuren

Käthe Kruse (born 1958 in Bünde; lives and works in Berlin) was a member of the legendary avant-garde artist group Die Tödliche Doris or The Deadly Doris. Based on music from West Berlin and situated there in the 1980s, the collective occupied all branches of art such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video, literature, and film. Even today, Käthe Kruse skilfully combines these media into one overall concept. In her most recent project, she is interested in the interplay between language, politics, and media coverage—every day since 2015, the artist has collected twenty-five headlines from a German daily newspaper. She filters out the nouns from the headlines to alphabetize them: from “Abstiegsangst” (Fear of Social Exclusion) to “Zuwanderungsrekord” (Immigration Record). Kruse transfers her research onto eighty canvases in one overall installation; she uses the tableaux to depict a cross-section of current affairs. The expansion of her work into the medium of sound is typical for the artist. Kruse sets the tableaux to music and presses her performative reading on vinyl. Together with the eighty plates and an accompanying booklet, the vinyl comes in a slip lid box, jointly forming the subject matter of this experimental artist publication.

Complementing the publication, a 116 × 116 cm printed scarf is available as a special edition at DISTANZ.