Katharina Jabs

A Grin Without a Cat. The Very Tale

Die Expansion des Off

Katharina Jabs (b. Shakhtinsk, Kazakhstan, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her films envision scenes in front of and behind the camera as well as beyond the frame. A space emerges outside the field of view, in the filmic offscreen, that must be traversed. In that domain—in montages, rhythms, and choreographies—characters, voices, and the other transcend their limitations. Jabs develops postscripts and notations as analytical instruments of the filmic process. Latent content, temporal and spatial structures become the lynchpins of a graphical-pictorial poetics. Cartography delineates the bounds of the filmic and opens them up toward the peculiarities of the artist’s own aesthetics of production.

The richly illustrated artist’s book A Grin Without a Cat—The Very Tale takes the form of an expanded cinematic novel based on the film of the same title. It lays out the film’s development, research, and postscript around the motif of the “catless grin”. With essays by Kayo Adachi-Rabe, Insa Härtel, Charlotte Klink, Johanna Markert, and Pedro Martins Beja.