Sunday Best, 2011
According to an old English proverb the devil divides the world between atheism and superstition the devil is hoofed and often depicted as cloven-footed, sporting a hoof split into two toes‚ almost a visual metaphor for the above divide.
In Claudia Sarnthein’s work Sunday Best , the devil’s hoof enters in the Teutonic disguise of a rather solid and carefully crafted horse’s foot (German: Pferdefuß). If something has a Pferdefuß, it means in a transferred sense there is a catch, a snag, some kind of drawback. It indicates a devilish feature of the thing: something that is foul, even if we cover it up with Sunday best clothes.
In folklore Satan’s hoof is sometimes seen as even more mischievous than the devil himself. Seen from close up, its image functions like a partial meaning that maps itself onto the contextual body‚ identifying it either as part of a horse or the devil. It depends on our belief system.
The Pferdefuß is only one visual trope that could come to mind when unravelling the different elements of Claudia Sarnthein’s multi-medial body of work. Partly shown as table installations, which suggest meanings rather than directly identifying content, her altar-like arrangements ask us to connect fragments and follow associative trails that lead toward narrative intersections between various elements dis-playing private codes we can merely sense rather than properly undo. These things do not come together if we only take them at face value: to a certain extend we need to follow a rather devilish superstition to knit together these non-linear triggers into an opaque, only ever momentary belief system.
Dr. Wiebke Leister, Sunday Best, PastVynerStreet, London, 2011
According to an old English proverb the devil divides the world between atheism and superstition the devil is hoofed and often depicted as cloven-footed, sporting a hoof split into two toes‚ almost a visual metaphor for the above divide.
In Claudia Sarnthein’s work Sunday Best , the devil’s hoof enters in the Teutonic disguise of a rather solid and carefully crafted horse’s foot (German: Pferdefuß). If something has a Pferdefuß, it means in a transferred sense there is a catch, a snag, some kind of drawback. It indicates a devilish feature of the thing: something that is foul, even if we cover it up with Sunday best clothes.
In folklore Satan’s hoof is sometimes seen as even more mischievous than the devil himself. Seen from close up, its image functions like a partial meaning that maps itself onto the contextual body‚ identifying it either as part of a horse or the devil. It depends on our belief system.
The Pferdefuß is only one visual trope that could come to mind when unravelling the different elements of Claudia Sarnthein’s multi-medial body of work. Partly shown as table installations, which suggest meanings rather than directly identifying content, her altar-like arrangements ask us to connect fragments and follow associative trails that lead toward narrative intersections between various elements dis-playing private codes we can merely sense rather than properly undo. These things do not come together if we only take them at face value: to a certain extend we need to follow a rather devilish superstition to knit together these non-linear triggers into an opaque, only ever momentary belief system.
Dr. Wiebke Leister, Sunday Best, PastVynerStreet, London, 2011