In her exhibition „Gerade um die Kurve“ („Straight around the Bend“) Annebarbe Kau presents recent works of various media: video and sound installations as well as a group of new drawings and objects.The video works concentrate on a single subject: the back of a woman’s head. The situation could hardly be more familiar: we seem to be looking at a person waiting in front of us. Yet the commonplace situation contrasts with the artificiality of the mise en scène. The movement of her hair, unintentional starts or motionless perseverance can be understood as “plot”. The stillness and the renunciation of movement, of the swing of the camera, and thus of a readable narration, transplant the viewer to an atmosphere of concentration and composure.

The sound installation “hörbar” (“audible”) can be experienced with ears and eyes. The way the work functions and its individual elements, such as speakers and cables, are put ostentatiously in front of the viewer. The brittle poetry of the visible contrasts with the sound-space.When the differentiation of word, music, and sound becomes blurred, associations occur which do not force themselves on the listener, but rather allow her or him room for her or his own imagination. The cables leading to the speakers, laid out in a meandering mesh, acquire their own sculptural and graphic aspects.
One finds the same linear elements in Annebarbe Kau’s latest drawings. Serpentine lines, strokes of the pen, determined by the movement of the hand, suggest something musical in the rhythmic movements. Other works focus on the elementary means of the art of drawing: line formations are drawn extremely thin, planes sketched with coloured pencil. At times one seems to recognize vegetative forms, which applies as well to the objects of wires and yarns. Yet the descent from the linear drawing process pushes the mimetic aspect to the background.

Annebarbe Kau *1958 in Ratingen, lives in Köln (Cologne).