KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Germaine Koh

Canada

Homemaking, Urban interventions with string, since 2002. Photo: Germaine Koh. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

Germaine Koh makes works that pivot out onto the possibility of their reception. Koh’s confidence in the artwork’s ability to add meaning to the world combines what she can reasonably expect to believe about its significance, with a faith in what she cannot know or anticipate about it. […]

You are not required to know much to understand Koh’s work, although you are required to think. As is often noted in discussions of her work, Koh’s art is characterized by a material ordinariness. The works take form as a result of a certain kind of happenstance. Mimicking the artist’s expectations for meaning, available materials are made to function as correlates of what she wants you to understand. […]

In keeping with the legacies of conceptualism and post-minimalism, Koh makes art that maps fresh territory in a landscape colonized by the genres of popular culture. Because pop culture has already got it covered, […] Koh endeavours to show you that other kinds of experiences are available in the world. To do this she pulls back, turns the volume down, offers less than you had expected to need. […]

Partaking in neither the melodramatic pretence of romanticism nor the future orientation of modernism, Koh tries instead to reclaim the present. She invests in democratic principles as if they were the last outposts of political viability.

(Excerpt from: Rosemary Heather, ‘Supersaturated Quiet’, in: Germaine Koh: Open Hours, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada, 2002.)

Germaine Koh, born 1967 in Malaysia.