Nadine Karl
05.09.2025 - 18.10.2025
epiphenomenon
Gallery 3AP
In her artistic practice, Nadine Karl explores the multi-layered interweaving of temporality and fiction. At the center of her work are analytical dialogues between sculpture and installation that critically question conventional, linear temporal structures. Her works transform ephemeral and potential elements into complex, overlapping time-space structures that deconstruct concepts of identity and collective memory and make it possible to experience a dynamic, fleeting reality. A key feature of her practice is the multidimensional access via different senses: olfactory elements and sound are used specifically to create immersive spaces of experience that expand and destabilize perception. Eco-feminist issues are increasingly coming to the fore.
Karl draws on discourses of ecological feminism, planetary empathy and the "more-than-human world" to imagine new forms of connection between human and non-human actors. Her installations open up (fictional) spaces that stage time and space as flexible constructs influenced by social and ecological factors. They invite viewers to reflect on their own positions in the network of relationships between body, environment and narration. Literature and film - as forms of condensed time - play a central role in Karl's work. Her works make use of different cinematic and literary vocabularies, oscillate between genres and narrative forms and create hybrid interstices.
These complex approaches are exemplified in the exhibition "Epiphenomenon" (Epiphänomenon), which incorporates both the gallery's exhibition space - in a former workshop in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen - and the adjoining air-raid shelter in the basement. The basement space becomes an archive of memories, filled with sand. The space functions as a threshold between above and below, inside and outside, memory and imagination. In an age that increasingly insists on linear notions of time and archived concepts of identity, Karl's work opens up a poetic terrain in which the sand not only trickles, flows or falls, but tells a story. At the center is a mixture of sand and silver sand - a material that functions both as a fragment of the landscape and as a metaphysical cipher. The sand is reminiscent of natural erosion processes and the human inability to control time. In reference to Hiroshi Teshigahara's film The Woman in the Dunes (1964), the sand evokes an existential threat: man as a prisoner in an amorphous, boundless world of granularity, memory and ritual.
In the gallery space, the exhibition focuses on a series of talismans and photographs. The latter were created during an artist-in-residence in the desert and reflect its extreme topography, light conditions and geological depth. The photographs function as visual resonance surfaces - not documentary, but poetically condensed. The sculptural works - fragile glass talismans with a rough surface - are based on the motif of transformation: they refer to fulgurites, glass bodies formed by lightning strikes, which appear as ciphers of sudden transformation.
Embedded symbols such as hourglasses, hair or worry dolls refer to a practice of externalizing inner states. Their presentation under glass domes quotes museum orders, but undermines their clear legibility - the talismans remain enigmatic, between protective object, memory carrier and imagined narrative. Without accusation, but with quiet urgency, Nadine Karl's work sketches the arid silhouette of a possible reality - not as a prophecy, but as an imagined future in the field of tension between memory, fiction and geological truth.
Text and curation: Aileen Treusch
The exhibition is open daily by appointment.
Additional opening hours can be found on the website.
Opening hours for the Saisonstart September 04-07, 2025
Thursday, Sept. 4
3:00 - 7:00 p.m. Press from 3 p.m., opening at 5 p.m., artist present
Friday, Sept. 5
17:00 - 21:00 Long Night of the Galleries (The Frankfurt Art Experience)
Saturday, Sept. 6
12:00 - 18:00 Guided Art Walk at 14:30
Sunday, Sept. 7
12:00 - 17:00 Guided Art Walk at 12:00
Image credit: ©Nadine Karl, O my. emerging side effect, 2025, Videostill. Courtesy: the artist & Galerie 3AP / ©Portrait Nadine Karl, photo: Anna Jocham.
Gallery 3AP
Brückenstraße 76
60594 Frankfurt am Main
Press inquiries to: mail@galerie-3ap.de