Catharina Szonn (*1987) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the University of Art and Design Offenbach, Iceland Academy of Arts Reykjavik and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her artistic work she deals with technological and social realities of our present, in which she depicts machines as left-behind collaborators of an incessant idea of economic expansion. Her expansive installations poetically pose questions about the relationship between human and machine, progress and transience. The boundaries to philosophical themes, textual and linguistic creations are fluid in her mode of expression.

During her stay in the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Catharina Szonn worked on the video projection with the working title „All watched over by machines of loving grace“. The title itself cannot be understood as an experimental interpretation of Adam Curtis‘ documentary film „All watched over by machines of loving grace“, but rather as a literal search for a visual connection between movement, machine, grace and its model-like quality. Starting from a filmed rotational view of a motorized BBQ grill spit, the artist develops a cinematically poetic juxtaposition between artificially model-like and technically machine-like motion sequences. For the project, Catharina Szonn went on a search for Machines of Loving Grace in the Museum of Industrial Culture in Osnabrück, as well as in the Dino Zoo Metelen, among other places, and brought them into a abstractly humorous dialogue in addition to her own text and material language.

[…]
what kind of beauty
binary functions
empty hearts can not break
intimacy is contactless