Stories
26 February – 23 March 2015
centrum, Berlin

Dagmar Heppner recently worked with and around textiles or garments with attention to the unstable relations between objects, or between individuals and bigger structures. For her exhibition at centrum, Stories, the artist has worked site-specifically focusing on the characteristics, the quirks, and oddities of the exhibition space. To that end, Dagmar Heppner has designed and sewn two ‘garments’ for both the larger and the smaller of the two bow-shaped pieces of fake wall sitting next to each other on one of the long walls protruding from it taking the form of textile sculptures. Presented on a plinth we find another of Heppner's works, a bundle of loose woolen strands, formerly a piece of clothing, whose threads the artist has carefully untangled for the garment to be forever altered beyond recognition and repair. Studying the vast variety of complex weaving patterns, the different structures and textures of fabrics, Dagmar Heppner is interested in textiles and garments for their potential as metaphor to explore the theme of the exhibition - Stories. Heppner is interested in stories as our social fabric and underlying texture of our worlds, and in how narratives affect our perception by offering patterns of recognition. The artist thus understands stories not as coherent, linear narration with beginning, middle, and end, with progress to and regression from a climax. Instead, Heppner treats stories and storytelling as social phenomena and as means of making sense of the world and relating to it through negotiating it with others; stories thus existing as a living dynamic thing in a state of continuous flux. Placing her works in the space like subtle and poetic suggestions, as hints and clues inviting our attention and interpretation, Heppner encourages us to read the works as volatilising structures and to see them for their precarious contexts.

Mareike Spendel