Room Service is the long-weekend emerging of an exhibition that brings about the very best potential of the spatial interventions of Karsten Konrad. This is sculpture that is not static or stale, but a working method that gains a momentum and keeps up the attention to stay with, to see more and to let the work stare back. A room with an acutely generous view, so to say, and a service that ask us, invites us to engage closer with riches of the nuances and the details.

The central piece in the exhibition is a work called Superfly. As with the name of the exhibition, the connotations are plenty, and they are certainly playful. There is the conceptual act that combines the less-than-functional form and the pleasurable visual effect of the work. It is a fine-tuned strategy that puts fun and funk back to the art processes.

This is an artwork that is very busy connecting the dots from the there to here, from almost lost to newly found, from what has been forgotten and now has won a new life, a new beginning. Out from the cold, and into the heat. Let me repeat that: out of the cold, and into the heat.

With Superfly, we get the colours, colours that blind and bind. It sets us onto an attractive trip that goes both ways of the time frame: it extends to the la-la-land of imagined Technicolor of the 70’s, and it brings us back to the contemporary site and situation with the promise of the future, a bruised but brilliant future embedded into these surprising shades and shakes of the new connection.

With these sculptural translations, Karsten Konrad takes and uses the material of the everyday, stuff that we have all used and are familiar with, and transforms them into something else, something that is no longer held together by a linear contract, but something that is more, much more than just a sum of its visible parts. A transformation that activates the past into the present, adding the public life into the realm of a personal touch – highlighted with the sense and sensibility of the memory of a matter that all of a sudden matters more than ever before.

Text: Mika Hannula