KATRIN KORFMANN
VU Medical Center | Katrin Korfmann (1971, Berlin, Germany)
In the work of Katrin Korfmann, the interplay between photography, video and spatial installation leads to unusual results. Korfmann creates a tension between rest and motion in all of her work, and this helps give her images a strong affinity with performance. The integration of time in the photographic image, the ‘timing’ of the image, is important in Korfmann's work: she inserts stationary models into her time-exposure registrations of people’s movements in public space, or analyzes movements moment by moment.
Korfmann's Free Space is the VU Medical Center. To a large extent, a contemporary hospital is a public space, and Korfmann was able use this fact in applying the concepts behind her work in a natural manner here. Her text and her work show that the Medical Center is a place of passage, routine and experience for visitors, staff and patients.
Contrasting Images
Katrin Korfmann
At the moment when I was asked to take part in the Zuidas Free Spaces artist-in-residence project, I had no idea what the Zuidas actually was. Then I was told about the grand plans that the Zuidas Project Bureau had for both art and the world of commerce. That sounded like a strange combination to me. I was asked to work in the VU Medical Center for a period of six months and start a new project inspired by this environment. I felt like a pioneer sent to an uninhabited island.
I ended up in the drawing office of the general and technical services department, with a spot assigned specially to me equipped with telephone and internet, and with three architects who were working on the constant changes and expansion of the hospital. Suddenly I had new colleagues with a totally different background – a very pleasant experience, I must say.
In the new section of the VU Medical Center I discovered a lecture hall that looks more like an opera hall than an auditorium. Standing there and looking at the space, I got the idea of making photographs of this auditorium while the seats were being filled by patients. This image came on the one hand from the idea of turning the doctor/patient relationship around (medical students and doctors normally sit in this room and look at patients), and on the other hand I was interested in the patients’ relationship to this space.
I wanted to visualize these relationships in a photographic image, one that could also convey a strong connection with the whole idea of the Zuidas – this hall as a good, chic likeness of the future set against the reality of patients in the present. Perhaps we should always keep on contrasting the image of actual reality with the images that we work so hard to polish.
