Kirsten Pieroth uses everyday objects, situations and activities, isolates them from their original settings and inserts them into a different context. This transfer causes an irritation in the interpretation of perception: individual things, which we usually identify according to their form, function, or use, no longer offer this habitual perspective ascribed to them, but instead refer to multiplied readings, strange systems of reference, and absurd chains of association.

The exhibition in the Secession Galerie offers the first comprehensive survey of Kirsten Pieroth’s recent work. Presence and absence, mental and physical distances, the relation between places and the tension between the literal and the abstract aspects of linguistic signs form thematic fields among the works in the exhibition.

For Short Story (2004) Kirsten Pieroth acquired a dedication signed by Mark Twain: the artist then used the document signed with the words Truly Yours, Mark Twain as a ticket for a short trip on the Berlin commuter railway (S-Bahn), as the stamped validation on the paper shows. By juxtaposing two contrary fields of association—“short trip” and “short story” divergent logics of space and time intersect.

The reversal of an incident and the tension between an event, its representation, and its description formed the starting point for Mein Flug über den Ozean (2002). The artist, who could not travel to an exhibition in New York herself, decided to make her absence the subject of her contribution to the show. Mein Flug über den Ozean is the title of the first German edition of Charles Lindberg’s book about his legendary one-person flight over the Atlantic in 1927. Kirsten Pieroth sent the book, tied up with a cord and with stamps for the postage via airmail the other way across the Atlantic. On view in the gallery in New York the book object not only re-signified the title story but also the notion of site-specifity fundamental to contemporary art.

Indonesien, a map showing the “largest islands of Indonesia in alphabetical order”, also dislocates traditional conventions. The orientation providing logic of geographical maps is substituted by an arrangement that supposes the linear sequence of an itinerary.