Working Ethics (from a certain Flanders)
Krinzinger Projecte (Vienna , Austria) – Catalogue

(...) Karin Hanssen's drawings Modern Living are a series of graphite drawings on paper, as small in scale as the old photographs on which they are based.

The drawings show situations that seem to come out of an optimistic not so far past: girls playing with records, a scene in a classroom, people at the swimming pool near a hotel, a picnic, a car in a landscape, spectators in a museum etc….

The drawings arte at the same time ‘tableau' and miniature; they depict the landscape of an optimistic world contained in the frame of the format. The images deal with and produce at the same time an tension between their status as simulacrum and original. The transfer from photograph to drawing marks a shift in temporality: the photographs witness of a specific moment but the drawings only index the duration their production. KH's drawings question the aspirations towards an idyllic bourgeois world by representing this idyll through an ironized reproduction. (...)

 

Philippe Pirotte, 2004