Peter Joch, 2012
Heike Weber plays with the dissolution of matter, covering space in fleeting, ‘emptied’ ornamental patterns. In her series “kilim”, for example, she presents large-format oriental carpets woven from white silicon threads. The carpets are open-weave, allowing us to catch glimpses of the floor below. Their effect is that of a fleeting web, a vision, a shadowy recollection. The weightless fabrics, apparently floating, remind us of old fairy-tales about a "Flying Carpet". They characterize art as a medium of enchantment, the immaterial and our thoughts, separating itself from the solid world and abandoning any form of everyday functionalism: in this way, the customarily warming, protecting item of furnishing, the carpet, becomes a ‘useless’, open structure that also contradicts the usual purpose of the profane filler, silicon. The carpets also enable an open view of ‘alien’ cultural circles: with her literally emptied carpets consisting of labyrinthine, confusing sequences of ornamentation, Heike Weber employs irony to comment on profoundly insubstantial but all too familiar clichés about the world of the Orient. Finally, the carpets also represent a combination of artistic genres. To use Heike Weber’s own words: “I take a functional object and transpose it into a spatial drawing; in this way it develops into a sculpture.” As a large-format, basically unusable carpet, this sculpture completely blocks off the space for visitors, demonstrating a presence that we cannot overcome. At the same time, it symbolizes empty space or the disappearance of objects.
Heike Weber: born in Siegen in 1962, lives and works in Cologne. Exhibitions: incl. MMKK, Museum Moderne Kunst Kärnten, Klagenfurt; Goethe Institute Prague (curator: Stephan Berg), Goethe Institute, Toronto; 300 Jahre Dorotheum, Vienna (with Erwin Wurm, Peter Kogler and Lynne Cohen)
Translation: Lucinda Rennison