Kathy Prendergast, Atlas
Exhibition Catalogue published for 'Kathy Prendergast - Atlas' at Kunst-station Sankt Peter, Cologne, June 16 - July 28, 2019.
Publication includes introduction by Guido Schlimbach and an interview between curator Anne Mager and Kathy Prendergast.
With subtle but profound sophistication and elegance, Kathy Prendergast approaches issues such as identity, location and power. Since the beginning of her career, she has included maps and cartography in her work, which she modified in various ways. Guided by the principle that “all cards are subjective”, Prendergast gives them an emotional and personal level. At the same time, through artistic processes of extinction and transformation, she manages to shift power structures, subtly dismantle imperialist narratives and uncover the fragility of political gestures.
At the centre of Kathy Prendergast's extensive installation “Atlas” are terms such as settlement, migration and localisation. The artist has transformed an everyday object, a standard AA street atlas for Europe, into a complex and expansive visual statement. The artist meticulously overdrew over a hundred copies with black ink, removing all geographical details - except for cities and municipalities, which remain as small dots in a black sea. Borders, rivers and names are gone. Only the places of human settlement still provide geographical orientation. Arranged on folding tables, the atlases form a complete, albeit distorted, map of Europe, its borders and land masses. From the gallery of the church there is a general overview of the installation and the arrangement of Europe. Here the artist is also presenting her sculptural work “The Road”, specially developed for the exhibition in Sankt Peter, in which she continues fragmentary pieces of street from the cartographic surface into the three-dimensional space.
Kathy Prendergast's cartographic interventions deal with questions of territory, property and political names and trace the traces of colonialism. Especially in view of the current discussions about the European elections, Brexit and the European external borders, the fragile, space-consuming installation shows us the fragility of Europe and reminds us that national borders are always human constructs.
Published in 2021 by Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Köln
