The Big Bang

One of Alicja Kwade’s series of works consists of a stand-alone clock, or a sequence of clocks on a wall, where the second hands don’t move forward but rather the clocks spin around. They always tell the correct time, but only have the expected orientation once every minute. They are well-engineered, confusing objects and, like much of the art that Kwade makes, bring the shifting nature of our perception of time and space into relief and therefore reality.

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Let’s take a trip back in time, to Cold-War-era Katowice, communist Poland in 1979, when Kwade was born to intellectual parents. In 1987, when she was 8, the family fled from East to West Germany, pretending they were just going to a wedding in France. A couple years later, the Berlin Wall came down. In 1998, when she was 19, Kwade moved to Berlin to study sculpture at the city’s University of the Arts.

One day while at college in the year 2000, Kwade was looking through a fashion magazine and was surprised to see a photograph of a young woman who looked just like her. So, she decided to perform a small experiment. She took a photograph of the photograph and sent it to her mother, who, too, believed that it was her daughter. This inspired an early artistic breakthrough: Kwade photographed herself in the same style and pose as her twin in the magazine, then placed the two representations beside one another so that they appeared to be looking at each other. It’s a simple trompe l’oeil that brings to mind doubling, mystery, and chance, the great coincidence of finding somebody that looks exactly like you. Where better to find your doppelgänger than in a fashion magazine in Berlin at the start of a new millennium?

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A couple decades later, in 2021, Kwade made herself her own subject once again for her solo exhibition “In Abwesenheit” (“In Absence”) at Berlinische Galerie. She was by then a well-known, successful artist and decided that this show would be an unorthodox self-portrait and an investigation into the nature of the self. Regarding herself with the same impassivity she would a stone, Kwade began by recording her data and taking an inventory of her constituent parts. Twenty-four loudspeakers mounted on a large steel ring, suspended askew in the air, played her heartbeat through the gallery. There were also 24 glass ampoules displaying each of the chemical elements that make up her body, and ours as well. Her entire DNA sequence—the code that makes up Alicja Kwade, with which you could clone another Alicja Kwade, like the girl in the magazine—was printed over 314,000 pages arranged across the walls. Outside, she placed a weathered bronze of herself with a sheet over her head: a gag, but also a ghost of herself, another double.

For an older exhibition in Berlin’s St. Agnes church in 2013, “Nach Osten” (“Eastward”), Kwade had hung a swinging, illuminated light bulb in the wide-open, enormous dark space. Her works often demonstrate or test the laws of physics, and this was a monumental version of Foucault’s pendulum, an experiment that gives form to Earth’s rotation in the revolving shapes drawn in the air by a pendulum. Earth pirouettes at around 1,000 miles an hour and orbits the sun at around 67,000 miles an hour, although we somehow cannot feel this at all. There is a coincidence in finding an image of yourself in a magazine—which could happen to you, any time you turn a page—but a much greater coincidence has already happened, that of being born and living here in this moment in this crazy reality. Kwade once calculated that she is a constellation of five-and-a-half times 10 to the power of 27 atoms—ancient atoms that were once stardust and came down from space. The electrons in these atoms inside of her are, according to her estimations, traveling at approximately 5,000,000 miles an hour. It is hard to concentrate on this matter, these abstract concepts, she says, for when you attempt to, they’re blurred. Kwade is a galaxy of swirling atoms in time and space. She is a brief event, in this moment, making art about this strange situation of life.

The artist does not believe in many of the systems with which we organize society and structure our models of reality. It’s even hard to believe in yourself as a system, she says. “This is an old philosophical debate: We are born, and we are raised, and we believe that we are conscious about ourselves. That we have a will—a free will and that we see things and hear things as they really are. This has been called “the hard problem of consciousness” by philosophers. So it’s hard to believe in yourself. Of course we do, otherwise we could not even step out the door, but there is no proof of it. It could be just an illusion of your senses.” It’s a very old question, she says, but nevertheless she believes in her individual subjectivity and her ability to express herself. “I have to, otherwise I couldn’t work as an artist. This is the funny thing about myself: On the one hand, I do not fully believe in all those things, while on the other, I really have to believe in what I do, otherwise I would not do it. You have to believe in yourself very deeply.”

The day after we speak, Kwade’s monumental work LinienLand, 2018, was unveiled at its new home in the Storm King outdoor sculpture park in upstate New York. Emerging from the long grass in front of the trees, it comprises a black, stainless steel cubic lattice into which 17 perfect stone spheres—their polished swirling sur- faces evoking gas giants, their arrangement suggesting a solar system—have been placed. Her best-known work in the states, her ParaPivot installation for The Met’s Roof Garden, which joined the New York City skyline for the summer of 2019, was another arrangement of incredibly heavy planet-like stones that appeared to float in the air. Only this time they were held by two sets of interlocking rectangular frames rotated around multiple axis points. “They’re not meant to be specific planets, like Mars, or Jupiter,” says Kwade. “It’s more about an idea of different rules, of parallel universes, of other versions of yourself, of different lives and different possibilities.” There are infinite different lives that we could lead; imagine the two Alicjas from earlier as coming from parallel universes, from different Earths. Think about the many thousands of different models by which we pretend to understand reality, and the many more we could come up with. Her frames and grids are intended to represent human systems, be they economic, political, or social, that govern our day-to-day lives—systems of which Kwade is profoundly skeptical. “Every thinking person on this planet should be very skeptical about everything,” she says. “Because some of those systems are useful and others aren’t. Some come from random accidents, others were made very much on purpose. Some are abuses of power, others are just funny, or stupid. But none of them are true.”

“The world is probably not as we have imagined it to be, but still we want it.”
— Alicja Kwade

These stone-and-steel monuments can be understood as conceptual models of reality. She is investigating the mystery, the great unknown, by sculpting our understanding of the universe—this has been a role of the artist for thousands of years. “Art’s role in daily life is quite underestimated,” Kwade says. “It’s still seen as a very elite pastime, cut away from many people. This is frustrating, because actually art and culture are everywhere, and it’s easy to see; it is what we are leaving behind as human beings. When people visit old churches, cathedrals, and historical places, much of what they are seeing is art—it may have been made by people that were not calling themselves ‘artists,’ but nonetheless they were trying to form the information they received from this world into a piece of matter.” This is what she does as well, of course, and why she too likes to make large public works and have them installed in parks and in cities, where people can encounter them. “The role of an artist hasn’t radically changed since the very beginning, when people first started to make it.”

Not all of her models of the universe are so large and imposing. Inspiration for another series came while Kwade was in her kitchen, peeling a lemon for an asparagus dish, and noticed that the rind fell naturally into a double-helix form. This became her series of “Quantum” sculptures made by peeling lemons, oranges, apples, potatoes, and bananas into curling forms suggesting, for her, string theory—the idea that reality is made of vibrating one-dimensional objects called strings—then having them cast in bronze at the forge. Smaller pieces like these, or a melon cast in bronze, painted bright yellow and titled The Sun, 2022, have a lighthearted quality that is exceedingly important to her. Though she is thinking very hard about the structure of reality, Kwade believes you also need to laugh to keep yourself from going mad, and to remain modest. It’s important to bring a touch of levity to art and to life. “All of these people think of themselves as so important; this seems very, very humorous to me. I want to put our own relative scale, and the relative scale of what we are doing, into perspective.”

We humans don’t understand much about anything. “Not much,” she says. “I think a little, tiny bit, possibly—which is beautiful somehow. How could we dare to think that we can understand anything? We are in a really funny situation. We have no idea what’s out there. We have not the slightest idea of where we come from and where it all leads. We try to figure this out, and have been doing so for so many decades, sifting and gathering some little pieces together. I think it’s just too insanely big for our brains, which makes it hard to be a human being. But there’s so much beauty in this. It’s like magic; we have no clue. When life is treating you well, it’s such a wonderful coincidence. But why is it happening? We have no idea. There’s a beautiful idea from Arthur Schopenhauer about how everyone wants to live, but nobody knows why. There’s tragedy in that, and beauty as well. I try to remind myself that this all is crazy. Our existence is crazy; it’s insane. This alone is hard to believe.”

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As far as Schopenhauer’s quandary of why people want to live, Kwade thinks it’s because we know what’s to come. “Even in difficult situations, we want to hold onto life, and we don’t want it to end,” she says. “Most of us do not want this coincidental event of ourselves to end, but we know it is going to end, and that’s why we want to keep going. The world is probably not as we have imagined it to be, but still we want it.” In her sculptures of clocks, hands tick without moving while the clock faces revolve in reverse; they show us time passing, slipping away, and reality unrolling, and remind us that we are free to think of the world in whatever way we choose.