AMSTERDAM.- Dear Sides is a new film installation that is generously lending its name to the constellation of new pieces that Katja Mater is showing at P/////AKT; “I live in a text driven world with a severely dyslectic brain. Because of my dyslexia it often feels like things can flip around, and do, while it does not make that much of a difference to me. I can read almost as fast up-side-down as right-side-up. Left to right or right to left. Why is it that dyslectics flip their letters, their numbers, follow their own logic and invent their own ways? People with dyslexia do not naturally process written words or take on tasks in a linear manner, they do not work their way from left to right or top to bottom. They tend to approach the world in a more visual way and take in word as shapes from all angles. While writing, they “draw a picture using letters” and orientation does not seem that important.”

As a result, one could say, Mater is essentially interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, recording events that simultaneously can and also cannot be, holding midway between information and interpretation. One way of doing this is by creating hybrids between photography or film with other media, where their interaction is blending and binding them together, where they behave as one but at the same time reveal each other’s distinctive qualities and glitches.

For Mater, time is both tool and material, and her work process (much related to painting) a mediation of time, which she squeezes into a single image. Entangled multiplied or shuffled, performed and recorded, while being counterbalanced with our perception, our understanding and our expectations of both.

In memory of Ruud Molleman — While working on this exhibition I lost a friend and mentor. Ruud helped me to realize many 16 mm film works by specially inventing and building new tools and methods not rarely out of the ordinary. He has been a huge support for me and my work over the years, always open to go off the beaten path. Thank you for all your trust, help and patience, I will miss you deeply.

P/////AKT is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the opportunity to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.