Katrina Daschner: Radical Handicraft
The "blank map" has always been a nightmare for every pupil. On a map without legends one had to locate places, rivers an mountains - a rael challenge as there were only a few points of reference to assist the orientation. One of them were the outlines of the countries and continents.
Katrina Daschner´s maps leave the public even without those: they are crocheted and occasionally mounted on white or grey canvases: they do not correspond to a known State or continent but rather provoke such an illusion - fictious territories to be understood in Daschner´s works not in the geographical or national sense but rather in their social context: similar to the utopian allegorical (pseudo-) maps from the 17th and 18th century they allude to thinkable forms of relationships without formulating them explicitly. They represent platforms for projections in a world beyond heteronormative structures of relationships - in the literal sense. On one of her three map - pictures Daschner projects a video having the queer desire as a theme: here a dancer and asailor are flirting intensly - in reality they are however identical. For this Daschner has looped a clip from a film shot in Egypt in the forties - in the relevant scene the actress Naima Akef plays the woman as well as the man. In another picture Daschner combines stills taken from a video showing a love act between two young women being secretly observed by an elderly one: originally it was part of a larger instalation wherin Daschner transferred Vladimir Nabokov´s "Lolita" into a lesbian environment.
In this context the technique of crocheting appears in a different light: here crochting usually associated to a heterosexist allocation of roles stands for an open field still to be defined - or perhaps not. Furthermore in the face of the large format of the continents, crocheting - for Daschner it represents a medium just like painting - looses entirely its guarded, homely, cosy character. Consequently the artist loves to talk about "Radical Handicraft" - and this term certainly speaks for itself.
written by Nina Schedlmayer