Isabel Carvalho works with drawing, painting, performance and text; the book as an artistic medium as well as writing and publishing are key components of her artistic production. Carvalho’s projects investigate and negotiate strategies relevant to the political, social and cultural themes to which the artist is committed in her own, often collaborative praxis. In this context, her main concern is to reach the widest possible openness, enabling interfaces and mutual permeation. Carvalho’s most recent complex of work was inspired decisively by her reading of “Tropismes”, a meticulous prose study of interpersonal “movements under stimulus” (this is the physiological definition of the term ‛tropism’) published by writer Nathalie Sarraute in 1986. Following a detailed plan of work, the artist undertakes a complicated investigation into the implications of movement – the individual’s impulses, reactions and associations, and self-reflecting subjectivity. In the spirit of tropism as a “movement in a new direction”, Carvalho went on a journey to North Africa to collect associations in dialogue with the continent and its culture, bringing back typical elements and materials to Berlin, where she associates them with local materials in their turn. In Künstlerhaus Bethanien Carvalho is now presenting a number of such materialised associations and permeations: filigree ceramic objects made from a mixture of earthenware and chinese ink are reminiscent of oriental window grilles; a sequence of abstract drawings arouse associations with landscapes of sand dunes or choreographic sketches, glowing in the delicate pastel shades of the cosmetic powders used and in Moroccan ochre; she will also be showing an installation made from 100 small-format acrylic panels with her own engraved poetic sentences, which can be turned around their axes like weather vanes – all these elements are residues of a journey that develop into the geography of a nomadic experience. It is documented in turn by two small-format publications, also presented as part of the exhibition.

2013