Vacuum-formed plastic, blackboard paint, chalk pencil on string,
wood rail as wall mount
15 x 10 cm (5.9 x 3.9 inches)
Edition of 12 + 2 AP
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Sophia Pompéry’s edition Worlds (small Germany) represents a geographical relief plate, as it is typically used in geography class for teaching purposes. Coated with blackboard paint, the relief is freed from scale, political borders, place names, or other coordinates, which would usually help localize one’s position on a map. Complemented by a pencil, the relief chalkboard invites the involved viewer to leave his (or her) personal sphere, prompting him (or her) to reconsider the surrounding world, and to sketch up an own vision of it.
Scientific and at the same time poetic, the little blackboard becomes a metaphor of our understanding of space. It raises the question how space is used and often exploited, whilst establishing topics such as possession, geopolitical power constellations, migration, and their ecological implications.
With Worlds (small Germany), Pompéry makes tabula rasa and resets the world as we know it back to zero, setting our imagination free towards infinite time and space, like a runway for our thoughts to take flight.
Sophia Pompéry’s conceptual works are focused, silent and profound. They operate at the intersection of everyday poesy and physics and invite the viewer to reconsider the surrounding world, shifting between installation, photography and video. Motivated by a desire to slow down the sense of time the artist believes in the power of observation. Playing with our visual perception, Pompéry traps the viewer without denying reality. Drawing on physical phenomena she creates an interplay between the laws of nature, viewing habits, and expectations with the aim to open up as many associative layers as possible, obeying to the principles of minimalism.
By attaching all importance to small nothings of the everyday, Pompéry's work questions the viewer's established beliefs and reveals a poetic side in another truth. Ultimately, it is the viewer who completes the picture by drawing on his or her own experience and sense of retrospection, for example at the sight of a candle's flame which casts no shadow, or of two bits of popcorn with seemingly identical shape.
Sophia Pompéry (born 1984 in Berlin, Germany) studied sculpture at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee in the classes of Karin Sander and Antje Majewski from 2002 until 2009, prior to becoming a member of the “Institut für Raumexperimente”, founded by Olafur Eliasson, at Berlin University of the Arts. In 2012 she became a scholar of the arts program by the DAAD enabling her to complete a six-month residency in Istanbul. In 2013, Sophia Pompéry was awarded the Jaqueline Diffring Price among others. Her works have been shown both in Germany and internationally, including solo exhibitions at ARTER Space for Art in Instanbul (2012), Nassausicher Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2013), and at Galerie Dix9 in Paris (2013). Sophia Pompéry lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul.
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