19/05/2026
👀🔎Aus der Reihe PLAKT...
Katja Mater–Time is an Arrow, Error
Katja Mater explores how we see and understand the world. She works with photography,
film, drawing, installation and performance, often capturing things that are too fast, too
small or too subtle for the eye to register. For her, photography and film are not merely
tools to document reality. They actively shape the ways in which we perceive it.
By layering, stretching and combining different media, Mater focuses on what exists
between the visible and the invisible. She questions the idea that a photograph or video
records a single, fixed moment. Her works open up alternative ways of thinking about time,
space and perception. They can feel real and unreal at the same time, shifting between
information and interpretation.
Her series Time is an Arrow, Error (2020) reflects her fascination with mechanical time and
the ways we experience it. The 79 images in the series depict clocks that have been
mirrored, doubled or merged through multiple exposures. These visual distortions unsettle
the difference between time as something we measure and time as something we feel.
They suggest that time might stretch, multiply or lose its grip depending on context and
viewpoint.
The image used in the PLAKT series comes from this body of work. It invites us to think
about the gap between counted time and lived time. In the city, clocks are everywhere: on
stations, towers, façades and public buildings. They structure our days and give shape to
collective rhythm. When a clock begins to distort, as in Mater’s work, that structure wavers.
In a society that equates time with productivity, where efficiency often outweighs reflection,
her warped clocks introduce a quiet question: what would happen if time were allowed to
unfold differently — slower, softer, with room for pauses, uncertainty and everything that
sits between the visible and the unseen?
📸 - IKOB
