"In her post-minimalist performance project metrics, Katharina Ernst achieves extraordinary complexity through a clear concept of gestures and formal language: at the core is a percussion instrument that she uses to explore variants of polyrhythm and acoustic chaos, drawing inspiration from Steve Reich. In collaboration with other performers, Ernst translates these musical structures into a choreography and spatial concept as if based on a score. With these translation processes, between disciplines such as music, choreography, and architecture, the artist unravels the question how an abstract composition could be a mirror or even a model for social coexistence. In this respect, metrics not only underlines the importance of listening in a time of increasing social polarization, but also makes a substantial contribution to the discourse on the role of live arts in the exhibition context."

Jury Statement


Pictures by eSeL

"It is at once music, fine art, performing art, and dance, and none of them alone. Just as no single gauge can suffice to measure the world in all its cultural richness, no genre or term can adequately describe Katharina Ernst’s artistic practice. Many terms and all of them uttered at once on the margins of words and language would be needed to convey the performative moment in and through an expression. Performances by Katharina Ernst “expressly” push the artistic concept of a work to its limits. The composition is clearly structured with its three parts that specify which rhythms alternate or change in which order, how axes of movement and spatial figures merge or diverge. And yet: the polyrhythmic performance thrives on the overlaps and shifts, each of them emerging anew and only seemingly in a paradoxical singularity, planned and composed but never the same. As such, the sketchiness underlying the scores and compositions returns as an openness, leaving it to the performers to measure the space and time of the performance and the performativity of the space itself. The paradox or aesthetic of the performative resides in the fact that it can only be performed anew, but never repeated in the exact same way. In metrics, the metric returns, as it were, to or the point before the “original meter” – to the original question of gauges and their appropriateness: to a search that can only be answered performatively but never conclusively."

Andreas Spiegl, excerpt


Pictures by Michael Breyer (press pictures) and Markus Gradwohl (Installation view)