“When I moved from London to Berlin, I wanted to move away from the paint brush and the canvas. The first step on this road was the process of pouring. I poured tea onto paper and drew excerpts of handicraft tools into the emerging figures of tea. As the tools are portrayed in a very dynamic manner they in some way relate to the body. For me they represent elongations, condensation of bodies.”
Bettina Khano
Loretta Würtenberger asked the artist how the lengthy journey from oil painting to installation over the past five years came about.
Bettina Khano: I studied painting in London. When I moved from London to Berlin, I wanted to move away from the paint brush and the canvas. The first step on this road was the process of pouring. I poured tea onto paper and drew excerpts of handicraft tools into the emerging figures of tea. As the tools are portrayed in a very dynamic manner they in some way relate to the body. For me they represent elongations, condensation of bodies. Thereafter, I created images of smoke on paper and glass. The smoke emphasises that aspect of pouring tea that fascinated me: the uncontrollable. The smoke pictures were also based on dynamic scenes on paper, such as of sportsmen. Thus the beginnings of three-dimensionality emerged: smoke on glass on paper. This evolution led me to my current works: room installations with fog.
Loretta also noticed Bettina works a lot with black-and-white contrasts and inquired why:
Bettina: Tackling the subject of black-and-white contrasts led me to my current work in space / room - for one, because of the white wall on which paintings are hung, and secondly because I became more interested in light than in colour. I started with drawings of partings in charcoal. Charcoal drawings have always been a good tool for me to access a new sphere and gradually I approached the concept of disappearance. On my search for three-dimensionality, the charcoal partings were transformed into gigantic rubber partings attached to a wall, but reaching out from the wall into the room. That was the key move, albeit in a trepid format: away from paper, from the wall and into the third dimension. And it is this third dimension that the installations operate in.
In this gradual process of moving into space I learnt that my work takes the time it needs, that I cannot 'do' things, but that I must allow them to happen. An active 'letting happen' that occasionally requires quite a bit of training one's calmness.
Two years ago the first in a series of video installations emerged, entitled "snow blind". In conjunction with that installation body-sized video stills entitled "blind spot" emerged. The installation consists of a video show on a tiny screen in a small, white room, which is lit up by neon light in such a manner that the white colour of the room is reinforced into over-exposure - i.e. snow blind. Loss of one's sight because of over-exposure - for me this is a very powerful image. Apart from the over-exposure of light, the spectator feels his own body boundaries because of the tightness (80cm) of the room. You are in Alaska, everything is white, you look towards the horizon and you cannot see anything. The body looses itself and at the same time is reflected onto itself. The "blind spot" that the over-exposure of light creates is reflected into the inner self.
The video shows a strange, formless figure that moves around a white room. Bettina Khano had sowed herself into a body-coloured bodysuit filled with balloons. Loretta asked her what that felt like.
It was a very intense experience. Because of the balloons I could hardly see anything, only smell the plastic. An extreme inner world opened itself up to me, it felt as if I was in another body sewed into another body.
Loretta asked her whether this was part of the work of art for her.
No, it wasn't meant to contain any element of performance. The experience was only important for myself and thus was part of the production process. I am very tall and because of the length of my extremities can illustrate very well the dissolution of body and space. When filming in slow motion, all that remains is the upper part of the trunk.
Loretta noted that Bettina uses the word "the body's thinking" to describe her sensations.
Yes, this is how I approach my topics. I think with my body and ask: How can a body stretch itself into a room, become one with it? Often, the impulse for my work is in a single word that I picked up somewhere. These words then get stuck in my mind and the longer they remain there, the more they become part of me and at some stage become part of my work. These incubation periods can occasionally take years.
One word that was important for my fog works is: condensed transparency - I like such oxymorons. Because of the inability to figure out their meaning my thinking becomes dizzy and from the diffusion of the dizziness and the antipode to the gravity of thinking the ideas for my works emerge.
Loretta then asked Bettina what she intended to achieve with her installation "Implosion", a garden pavillon filled with artificial fog at the heart of which two mirrors cross each other and turn with each other.
The subject of this work is again the topic of space and body, in the sense of the dissolution of the space and the dissolution of one's own body boundaries -- both become infinite because of the fog. One can no longer recognise one's own boundaries nor that of the room, although it is a very small room. Fixed positions no longer exist, everything becomes diffused. It is a very irritation experience - you don't see anything and no one sees you, until you bump into the wall of mirrors or into another body. Loretta questioned whether Bettina is trying to escape precision. No, precision in my work is very important to me. But my concern is with a different kind of precision. I think that precision along the lines of the enlightenment - that is in terms of clear and obscure - leads to over-exposure and thus to the loss of one's sight. Precision in terms of clear and dark opens up spaces that are highly precise in their mistiness. With intuitive thinking, the body's thinking meets my need to portray the fact that things cannot be dissolved, cannot be explained. I don't want to reduce, I want to accept the blurredness. I don't think one has to come to the point in everything. For me, it's much more about coming close, respecting the space. The questions that I pose myself keep emerging in new forms and for me are very precise. Equally, precision in executing my works is very important to me, but the replies remain clearly obscure/dark - in the fog.
