SABINE HILSCHER – entangled - online solo exhibition - February 25, 2023

Sabine Hilscher (*1977) studied fine arts with Prof. Dieter Hacker and costume design with Prof. Martin Rupprecht at the Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin).

Her artistic practice focuses on performances in the field of New Music, where she works internationally for opera, drama, dance and music theatre. As a visual artist, stage and costume designer, she works at the interface of different art forms. In this way she designs costumes and stage sets, creates installations, plans visual concepts and performances and writes texts.

Recent works include costumes and animated drawings in a stage installation for the music theatre production "HYPHEMIND", Stuttgart/Basel 2022, which is a crazy journey into the world of mushrooms. Five people become mushrooms with their colorful, fascinating and individual fruiting bodies. Mushrooms become living and performative sculptures.

For many years Sabine Hilscher has been interested in visualizing aspects of networks and layers of different organisms and how these can be transferred to human networks and social structures. Mushrooms seem to be a perfect example for that. Unlike humans, fungi do not know of patriarchal, neoliberal, binary or intolerant forms of organization; they do not build any borders that need to be defended. Fungi form huge mycelia, often stretching for many kilometres, and work successfully in symbiosis with their own kind and other fungal species and plants for the benefit of all involved. This is a world where all groups are happy and live in a sustainable and peaceful environment. To capture this utopia, Sabine Hilscher creates costumes, draws mushrooms, plants and natural structures. She makes multi-layered three-dimensional collages and paper cuts that report from the inside of nature. She finely cuts out networks which she finds on road maps. She transforms them into human organs or translates them into abstract networks. These artworks invite the viewer to rediscover the beauty and preciousness of alienated nature.

In her works for various theatre productions, the idea of entanglement and complexity is always a central point for Sabine Hilscher. In the joint work with directing, composition and performing, the visual arts combine with text, music and acting to create an overall experience in the respective thematic context.

Text: Andreas Schlichtner / Sabine Hilscher, text edited by Bernice Sokol Kramer