Tina Schulz - KOW BERLIN - Berlin

through January 29th 2012

In ancient India, the board-and-dice game “Snakes and Ladders” stood for the power of fate, for strokes of luck and setbacks people can only humbly accept as they come. On their path from the starting square to the finish, players are frequently lifted forward (when they encounter a ladder) or thrown back (when they step on a snake). Strategic skill is of no avail; victory is a matter of pure luck. Tina Schulz adopts formal elements from the board for a seventeen-part series of graphite drawings in which they gradually dissolve. Working with unvarying building blocks—squares and wavy lines—she assembles her decompositions like variations on the theme of captivity in a systemic infinite loop. She takes what lends the game its fate-like structure—the continual return of circular movements through space and time—and applies it to the space of graphical perception, as well as to the overall conception of her first solo exhibition at KOW.

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