[2018] A New Room of One's Own (The Benchmark Standard)

Aluminum drywall construction, wallpaper, framed computer-generated image
290 x 200 x 9 cm

"[…] Virginia Woolf, whose 1929 essay is referenced in the title A New Room of One’s Own (2018), is a feminist icon, as are Charlotte Corday, Sanja Iveković, Mary Kelly, Théroigne de Méricourt, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ulrike Rosenbach, Kate Sheppard, Ellen Willis, and Rosa Luxemburg—whose name is borne by the Berlin square where an art association held Karina Nimmerfall’s exhibition of the above-mentioned project. Established today as activists, thinkers, and artists, they have become examples and role models to many. Like a cautionary reminder of their struggles for women’s rights and emancipation since the eighteenth century, their writings, symbols, and portrait photos are found as nearly imperceptible interventions (including a silver-reflecting M16 rifle as a lamp handle) in grandly decorated salons, staircases, and bedrooms that strike as uncannily homey. In the exhibition display, the scenes are attached to seemingly historical wallpaper as large-format computer-generated tableaux. These carriers are then placed within a white cube with a wedge-shaped layout, which was originally intended as a private apartment but converted instead into an art space. The reflexive site-specificity of the work is explicated on a further meta-level: the sterile box of the modernist white cube is itself a 'curious piece of real estate.' […]" - Lisa Stuckey