Katja Mater is a visual artist whose practice focuses on the parameters of photography and film from a meta-perspective, using them as non-transparent media. By creating hybrids between photography and other media such as drawing, installation and performance she documents something that is often positioned beyond our human ability to see. Interested in revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye, she mediates between time, space, perception and our understanding of them, recording events that simultaneously can and cannot be – holding midway between information and interpretation.

In ‘Density Drawings’ various moments during the creation of a physical drawing on paper are captured on a single negative, building a layered image of multiple moments in time. The drawing itself eventually becomes a monochrome; while the C-print is constructed of various steps along the way. A diptych in which both the drawing and the c-print show the process and the end result.

For ‘Time Passing Objects’ instead of taking multiple exposures on one negative, several negatives are used to capture the process of the making of a painting on an (unstable) paper object; While more and more paint is applied both this process and the consequent slight collapse of the object are documented on three negatives. All with (slightly) different outcomes by overlaying different fragments of the same event. Offering multiple ways of looking at one moment in time.

In ‘Tiled’ several of the different outcomes of the same event are brought back together. As c-prints they are enlarged, rotated or stacked and then tiled back into one image; where the final work is both one and many, fragmented and whole. Time splits, loops back around and walks into itself.

‘Random Interval’ behaves as an interruption - a random single moment during any of the above processes. A clear sudden view on of the making of another work: photography in its most fundamental form.

Katja Mater’s work has been exhibited internationally in institutions such as Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, De Vleeshal in Middelburg, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Temporary Gallery in Cologne, AMOA-Arthouse / The Contemporary Austin, Fotogalleriet in Oslo, Marres in Maastricht and Kiosk in Ghent. Her book Multiple Densities (2014) was published by ROMA Publications.