Kathrin Linkersdorff. Microverse
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7 September -10 October 2024
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With “Microverse,” Gallery Sanji in Seoul presents the first solo exhibition in Korea by German photographer Kathrin Linkersdorff. The exhibition offers an in-depth look into the artist’s experimental practice, which dissolves the boundaries between art and science in captivating ways.
Building on her well-known explorations of organic pigments, Linkersdorff has, in recent years, increasingly immersed herself in the field of microbiology. Through close collaborations with leading researchers, she has developed innovative imaging techniques that redefine photographic aesthetics in the context of organic growth and decay.
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At the heart of the exhibition is her two-year collaboration with Professor Regine Hengge from the Department of Microbiology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Together, they studied the survival strategies of bacterial colonies that coexist symbiotically with plants. By injecting soil bacteria — natural producers of antibiotics — into living plants, Linkersdorff documented the biological process of decay, offering a new perspective on the aesthetic experience of the natural cycle of growth and transience.
In this context, Linkersdorff’s work fundamentally questions conventional, anthropocentric perspectives. The compositions and color worlds of her photographs are not solely the result of artistic intention, but emerge from the living interaction between plants and bacteria, which themselves develop colors and forms. The photographic outcome remains a fleeting, fragmentary expression of these complex processes, which unfold under carefully defined artistic and scientific conditions.
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Despite the conceptual and process-based nature of her practice, Linkersdorff’s work is imbued with a poetic and emotionally compelling visual language. This is particularly evident in her “Fairy” series, in which the colors of flowers and plants are completely removed and subsequently re-applied using a scientifically controlled process that restores their original pigments. In these images, once-withered life forms seem to bloom anew — as if they had been briefly granted new life.The “Microverse” series visualizes chemical and biological processes inside Petri dishes. The resulting images evoke the meditative, minimalist aesthetic of Japanese ink wash paintings, in which landscapes reveal themselves through the most delicate of suggestions.
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Kathrin Linkersdorff’s photographs explore the aesthetics of transience — moments whose beauty lies precisely in their fleeting nature. Her work addresses universal questions of life, survival, and transformation, while creating new, moving narrative spaces within contemporary art through the synthesis of scientific inquiry and artistic imagination.
