Katrin Hornek
RIBOCA2 Riga Biennial, Latvia
20 August – 13 September 2020
The 2nd edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art was organised by French curator and writer Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, who invited 60 international and regional artists to respond to narratives that call for an imminent human-induced apocalypse. Recognising the current critical situation, the biennial looked at re-enchantment as a frame for building desirable futures, to reimagine ways of being human in a context of deep ecological, economic and social turmoil.
In this context, Austrian artist Katrin Hornek was invited to participate in the biennial with a new installation that further developed one of her most recent projects, namely, Casting Haze, which was presented at Kunsthalle Wien in 2019. Questioning our evolving relationship with CO2, this multimedia installation focused on research into the solidification of CO2 by mimicking the natural process of shell making on a very large scale. Hornek’s work, which often lies at the intersection of art and scientific research, asserts an understanding of the relationship between nature and culture by implicitly arguing that our bodies, cultures, materials, and thoughts are all intertwined. In this new work, co-produced with Phileas, Hornek focused on the interconnection of human and non-human entities thanks to the common matter that they share: the air.
Katrin Hornek (born 1983 in Lower Austria) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Royal Danish Academy. She teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is part of the interdisciplinary research project The Anthropocene Surge (WWTF). In 2017, Hornek was awarded a scholarship for visual arts by the Austrian Ministry of Culture.
