Galerie 3AP

In her artistic practice, Nadine Karl explores the multilayered entanglement of temporality and fiction. At the core of her work are analytical dialogues between sculpture and installation that critically question conventional, linear structures of time. Her works transform ephemeral and potential elements into complex, overlapping spatiotemporal configurations that deconstruct concepts of identity and collective memory, making a dynamic, fleeting reality perceptible. A key feature of her practice is the multidimensional approach through various senses: olfactory elements and sound are purposefully used to create immersive experiential spaces that expand and destabilize perception. In doing so, eco-feminist questions increasingly come to the forefront.

Karl draws on discourses of ecological feminism, planetary empathy, and the „more-than-human world“ to imagine new forms of connectedness between human and non-human beings. Her installations open up (fictional) spaces that stage time and space as flexible constructs shaped by social and ecological factors. They invite viewers to reflect on their own positions within the web of relationships between body, environment, and narrative. Literature and film – as condensed forms of time – play a central role in Karl’s work. Her practice employs various cinematic and literary vocabularies, oscillates between genres and narrative forms, and generates hybrid interspaces. These complex approaches culminate in the exhibition “Epiphenomenon” (Epiphänomen), which incorporates both the gallery space – located in a former workshop in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen – and the adjoining air raid shelter in the basement. The basement becomes an archive of memory, filled with sand. This space functions as a threshold between above and below, inside and outside, memory and imagination.

In an era increasingly focused on linear notions of time and archived identity constructs, Karl’s work opens a poetic terrain where the sand not only trickles, flows, or falls – but tells stories. At the center is a mixture of fill- and silver sand – a material that functions both as a fragment of landscape and as a metaphysical cipher. The sand recalls natural erosion processes and the human inability to control time. Referencing Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film Woman in the Dunes (1964), the sand evokes an existential threat: the human as 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 photographs were taken during an artist residency in a desert and reflect its extreme topography, lighting conditions, and geological depth. Rather than being documentary, the photographs function as poetic fields of visual resonance. The sculptural works – fragile glass talismans with rough surfaces – are based on the motif of transformation: they reference fulgurites, glassy formations created by lightning strikes, appearing as ciphers of sudden metamorphosis.

Embedded symbols such as hourglasses, hair, or worry dolls point to a practice of externalizing internal states. Their presentation under glass domes quotes museological systems of order but undermines their legibility – the talismans remain enigmatic, somewhere between protective object, memory carrier, and imagined narrative. Without accusation, yet with quiet intensity, Nadine Karl’s work sketches the sparse silhouette of a possible reality – not as prophecy, but as an imagined future in the tension between memory, fiction, and geological truth.

Galerie 3AP, Brückenstraße 76, 60594 Frankfurt/Main

For further information please contact us directly. With the generous support of SEHRING Sand & Kies GmbH & Co. KG