Kata Unger

The tapestry is at once the frame, the canvas and the picture

It is an object made up of wool and silk, animal-based materials.

I myself dye and weave the wool or silk fibres, warp and weft. The picture area is made up of just vertical and horizontal lines. The picture is the same front and back, just mirrored. The texture (structure) of the woven pictures is an analogy to the pixellated resolution of a display screen. To me, the medium of tapestry means prescribed time. There is a beginning and an end.

Text, textile, texture

Before I start on a work (tapestry), I carry out research.

A working group develops which consists of a number of drawings, pictures and texts which relate directly to the theme of the woven work. Some of these gathered symbols, codes, pictorial ideas are used in the weaving process, the rest are rejected as irrelevant.

The aim is not to achieve a pictorial lineup of fantastical association chains, but to retain to what has been seen and felt when capturing and composing the picture and check it for validity.

I work without a one-to-one cardboard draft so that I can move freely in this medium, which can be pretty rigid. Being able to react to chance or errors is important for the work. I often have no idea initially how the picture as a whole will look, even if I have rough composition sketches. I always see only a part of the tapestry, similar to a Cadavre Exquis, except of course I do know what I have woven already. Unlike painting, where corrections are made on the surface, I can only react to what has already happened, and anything I have already woven is never unpicked. Thus my tapestries can only be corrected if I change the composition graphically over and over as required after something has been woven.

Binary structures, patterns and sequences determine formal elements of the picture.


Life: Kata Unger

Kata Unger, born in Berlin in 1961, lives and works in Berlin.

2007 Founding of the project German Tatami (together with Frank Diersch), member of Kolonie Wedding.


CrackMe, or My Brain in the Cloud

Time-weave-hyperspace.
Thrust> Fire> Reverse> Black sheep! Survival of the fittest!
Synthetic culture cult here! Scratched screen? Display pixel?
Black-ink night journey! Ticker tape?
KeyGene-Defender! Access control not nessecary.
SmartBomb, falling star, ticker tape. WITHOUTSEX?
Body-spirit euphoria. Endless binary optimisation.


The Slomotionbar on the Tween Deck

A real place beyond all other places.
A floating space sliced through by laser beams.
A cargo space. A smoky go-go bar.
The tween deck in a sunken shipwreck.
A place of a time that no longer flows.
A heterotopia.


Forecasters

Homunculus in the computer cloud has finally attained godhead status and mastered prediction. Makes proclamations through holistic utterances, arranges the signs according to falling probabilities. Stands in the visionary overpressure of a discrete source without a memory, achieves reliable results from noisy data.

In short, he calculates until the expected value and the variation coincide and moments of a higher order are ignored.


www.kata-unger.com