Anu Põder: Writ In Water

GIANNI MANHATTAN is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Anu Põder (b. 1947, Kanepi, Estonia, † 2013, Tallinn, Estonia) that no longer survive as physical objects and are today encountered through her sketches and photographic documentation. At the centre of the presentation lies the proposition that sculpture can be understood as something away from permanence and is conditioned by its exposure to time. What remains of the lost artworks is neither a substitute or secondary to their presence, but instead their traces become the work’s current form and their present tense.

Across her practice, Põder employed unstable materials such as soap, textiles and beeswax, allowing transformation and eventual disappearance to enter her logic of form. Throughout her lifetime the camera and her drawings recorded her artworks but also extended them. The remaining documentation carries forward a vocabulary of touch, fragility and psychic charge, preserving situations and constellations that can never be fully replicated.

If loss is understood as absence or something physically missing, here it becomes generative. The lost object asks how an artwork can continue when its material substance is gone. In this oscillation between disappearance and survival, Põder proposes another durability—one held in transmission, in repetition and in the stubborn life of images.

Installed in the gallery, Põder’s photographs and studies operate as activations of the lost artworks. They stage a continual movement between what has been and what can still be imagined. In this instance documentation of her Estate becomes a threshold through which sculpture passes from material fact into memory, and from memory back into encounter.