THE BONGARD & CAROW COLLABORATION
Partnering they thrive
Since the mid-eighties, Katrin Bongard and Uwe Carow have intensively addressed questions of origin, the balance between relationships and individuality, role models and traditional structures (in private and public institutions) e.g. in families and in the art world.
Significantly their artistic collaboration begins with around four hundred letters they wrote to each other between 1985 and 1988. Starting off with the question why very few successful female artists have children, in contrast to their male colleagues. How developing a loving relationship, the desire to have children and independent artistic work are viable.
Not initially planned as an art project this correspondence contains all the elements that are fundamental to their artistic collaboration.
— It arises from an immediate existential life situation.
— It emphasizes the individual points of view gained through gender, origin, upbringing, values and belief systems.
— It represents an attempt to transform these viewpoints to a holarchically higher level through communication.
After the birth of their first daughter, they founded the presentation space Vorort in Berlin Wannsee as a joint art project in the early 1990s, where they alternately showed room-filling installations in front of a constantly growing audience.
They develop their work (unlike most other artist couples) largely independently of each other. As in functioning systems and relationships, the individual characters (the artistic signatures) remain, are in constant communication and temporarily or permanently integrate into a higher organization. (e.g. the installation).
The works remain independent and do not crystallize into rigid units. Depending on the location, topic and occasion, they can be reassembled based on formal, content and associative considerations.
In the temporary compilation, the works react to each other, complement each other, and increase in their aesthetic statement and narrative potential.