Alina Rentsch is an artist and writer from Berlin, based in Stockholm. She graduated with her BFA in Fashion-Design at Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin and is currently studying Fine Arts in the master’s programme at Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm. Working mainly with language, or more particularly with communication processes and structures of response, she is interested in questions surrounding the distribution of text and the role of the reader. Her artistic projects often materialize as text or textile works and performative situations. She has presented her work in exhibitions at Konsthall C (Stockholm, 2019), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Berlin, 2018), Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz (Berlin, 2017) and Salon am Moritzplatz (Berlin, upcoming in 2021). In addition she writes for the Berlin based art review magazine vonhundert, has been leading a three-part art education workshop series at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and worked as a Project Manager for the German artist Carsten Höller. In the scope of the Octopus Programme 2021-2022 she will work on a new project that departs from the system and form of cutting patterns which will be combined and rewritten with different figures of speech. Not only to emphasize an inventive use of language, but to propose new ways of reading.
project in process
Figur(e)/ation
The project departs from the form and system of cutting patterns. In tailoring, a cutting pattern is a template from which the parts of a garment are traced onto fabric before being cut out and assembled. A two-dimensional pattern representing a three-dimensional object, broken down into individual parts. A system of special contour lines, different types of lines, numbers and colours help tracing. In the proposed project, the practical guide-lines that are used to transfer shapes – the figures – taken at their word, are becoming a web of text. Replaced with different rhetorical patterns – figures of speech – the pattern lines are becoming word lines, sentences and form a printed linguistic image. An interplay between the materiality of words and the textility of fabric results – aiming to use language inventively to accentuate the effect of what is being said and enhancing the function of figures of speech as a motor for the creation of images in and through language.