The works of Sabine Kacunko offer little aesthetic prettification, nor are they the abstracted products of an artistic imagination running riot. Rather, Kacunko seeks merely to draw our attention, which is all too frequently diverted by technology and high political ideas, to a perfectly normal, naturally occurring phenomenon – what is already there, unseen and, in the eyes of the artist, wrongly uncelebrated.
— Arty Froushan
By dripping poisonous substances onto samples of blood taken from a cut in her finger and recording the visual and sonic reactions that arise, Kacunko examines the cooperative behavior of blood cells when put under stress and establishes a reciprocal dialogue between the black and white images of flitting cells and the ethereal soundtrack that submerges the room in its wraith like drone. The overall effect is quite otherworldly – ironic since its source comprises nothing more than indispensible yet utterly basic constituents of our natural world.
— Arty Froushan
Sabine Kacunko is an extraordinary alchemist, versed in photography, video, installation and performance, her artistic motivation rooted not only in the diverse facets of the visual arts, but also in a dialogue with biological, chemical and medical phenomena. Her iconography is not one of chance finds, nor the ‘one-to-one’ reproduction of natural aesthetic phenomena, but rather the result of an artistic transformation in which, by changing the medium and format as coordinates, space, time, organic fragility and conceptual rigor enter into a remarkable blend.
— Cristiane Fricke
The artist re-enacts the constant change from life to death, from renewal and impermanence, to the look inside people. She breaks it down into individual parts in order to pull it into the oversized. She lets her pictures dance on projectors on monitors and on a screen. The reactions of these tiny particles, the symbionts, are analyzed in real time with the help of specially developed software and implemented not only optically but also acoustically. Sabine Kacunko makes the constant change of renewal and impermanence visible: the “loop of life” or just - LOOPING LIFE.
— Barbara Borek
The individuality of the surfaces in public space, literally examined by Ms. Kacunko, appears in a completely new light thanks to the new achievements in communication technology. In every new section of her BOOTSCHAFT project, in every special, site-specific investigation, the question of the staging and reflection of trans local cultural identity finding arises again. The always new (re) constructed self- and external reference of architecture, culture and nature offers surprising answers.
— Christoph Machat
I have had the pleasure of working with Sabine since several years, as we started to discuss about how to maintain her community-engaged art practice, and how to collaborate with artistic- and academic, as well as institutional-based communities in her brilliant artistic work – all accomplishments that are hallmarks of Kacunko’s career. Her present major project called BOOTSCHAFT, is a project, that demonstrates not only in its basic conception, but also in its excellent artistic and aesthetic an intellectual and scientific claim.
— Douglas Davis
No trace remains visible of the original motif on the negative – an animal skull. Consumed by microorganisms indulging in their delectation of the gelatine-rich layers of film, to leave nothing behind but excrement – pigments, prettier certainly, than Manzoni’s tinned merda d’artista and almost as beautiful as Jackson Pollock’s furiously dripped and spattered canvases – superior to them ultimately, because the microbes labouring so aesthetically are engaged in a “work in progress”.
— Cristiane Fricke
Sabine Kacunko achieves a virtual balancing act that creates a synthesis out of diverse areas of knowledge, times and origins – not by simply joining individual elements additively, but perceiving the essentials, distilling them out and condensing them into a pictorial vocabulary of their own. And, as we know, the result is not achieved by virtue of discovery pure and simple either: nor is the artistic objet trouvé ever only a set of circumstances simply appropriated. There is a process of concentration, enrichment, ‘charging’ the found matter by omission or addition, alteration or reworking – at any event, one of exercising artistic influence.
— Cristiane Fricke
In bridging the gap between science and art, Kacunko sees herself almost as an activist in the public domain, a spokesperson for a better way of living with and within our world. ‘LOOPING LIFE’, concerns the very essence of our being by returning to what makes us who and what we are on the most elemental level. It is a graceful yet potent reminder of our essential biological constitution and the importance of cooperative interaction in today’s individualized society. Above all, it is an immaculately executed study in natural behavior […] We see when the microscopic is used to shed light on the macroscopic.
— Arty Froushan
I consider myself as a mediator between the two worlds, which are distinct in themselves, although they are related to each other. As human beings, we are becoming estranged from our real nature and are forgetting how to see connections between phenomena. Specialized knowledge should not mean isolation. I wanted to leave the ivory tower of art to enter the world and spread my knowledge. The observer becomes a witness of the different phases of decay and destruction. The fleeting has the potential for something completely new and different.
— Sabine Kacunko
With delicate shading she achieves a simple precision of a polished photo-aesthetics, from which a balanced paradox emerges: seemingly impersonal, cool outcome of her work contains all the subtlety, even the sophistication of the feeling, plus the tenderness – ensuing from the artist’s subject – ingrained in her sight and vision. This is why she gigantizes the frame: she wants to suggest the need for a more concrete, forceful, striking concentration for the sake of a vast abundance of certain natural elements in themselves and for themselves (as Kant would have it).
— Enes Quien
In fact, Sabine Kacunko is an exceptionally refined post-modernist artist who does not use a medium for its own sake but as a filter for those wondrous moments that the microstructures of the universe contain. That is why she is not a photographer but an artist for whom photography is in the service of art.
— Enes Quien
Sabine Kacunko makes use of a stylistic device of Arte povera that left the filling of trivial objects, simple forms and poor materials or surfaces to its observers and user. […] The pictures still have no colour. The black and white of the photographs and the cases and frames is itself an abstraction of the real, leading from the subject depicted to deeper levels. Love and death, pleasure and pain cannot actually be seen, in the end, neither are they the subject of the picture, which remains open. Sabine Kacunko leaves the investment of personal memories and feelings, entirely to us, the viewers.
— Rolf Sachsse
Sabine Kacunko has never been interested in attempts at circumvention, although she is occasionally a perceptual artist of a conceptual stamp as well. Nevertheless, she is no less an ontologist and, above all, a visionary too, who uses artistic media and imaging methods to refine the sought and the found, discovered and experienced beauties and truths, good and moderation, in a fine artistic balancing act with her faith, hope and love.
— Slavko Kacunko
From the chaos and the method, with which she artistically perpetrates death and its healing, Sabine Kacunko has unlocked an interdisciplinary field of research, in the best sense of the word, whose outcomes contribute to the pivotal issues: the meaning of art in an engineered society and to what extent art is still able to visualize, interpret and represent the world in the media age.
— Slavko Kacunko
In the almost sacral fixation of the animate in the black-and-white of photography as archetypical symbols of birth and death, Sabine Kacunko reproduces what has occurred as existentially singular, irretrievable. No future, no past can be found in these camera works, herein lies their melancholy – in the closure of time.
— Barbara Kösters
This puzzling atmosphere of standstill, the epitome of unsettling stagnation blocks both the memory and the anticipation of the future. The gaze is caught by the abundance of the image that engages the eye just as the iris – rotating on its own axis – unveils to us the iris of the human eye. The physiological gaze yields the phenomenological gaze that focuses on the multi-dimensionality of things and their perspective self.
— Barbara Kösters
In a true art-meets-science story, Kacunko’s research into Alexander von Humboldt’s famous desert-dust sample from 1823 – which showed that the dust in southern Italy had blown in from the Sahara – led to a startling discovery that increased her standing in the scientific community. Kacunko found that a section of RNA sequence in humans was identical in plants and animals (if DNA is the blueprint of life, RNA makes proteins that carry out its instructions). The artist named the new sequence Oceanobacillus pulvirenatus, or dusty rebirth.
— Gianluca Tramontana
The world can hardly regulate, let alone resist, dramatic and drastic technology-driven development that may as well accelerate environmental degradation. Sabine Kacunko´s LIFE FLAG is, therefore, a valid campaign to remind us of the dire need to strike a balance between ecology on one hand and political, social and economic development needs on the other.
— Ahmada R. Ngemera, Ambassador of the Republic of Tanzania to the Federal Republic of Germany
As a member of ICOMOS, expert for the Acropolis monuments in Athens and founder of the Biopatina research I find that the BOOTSCHAFT project of the brilliant black and white Photographer and video artist Sabine Kacunko puts her finger on the tooth of time. Your PATINA PROJECT is forward-looking and historical. Dust of millennia circles around the earth lies down on monuments and art objects, on living and deceased, gone. But the dust contains life and life story and is deposited in thin layers on the earthly objects. KACUNKO manages the colors, images and tones in an amazingly elegant way that circle the globe with their media installations not only freeze as a photo, but also even more to connect with the viewer electronically.
— Wolfgang E. Krumbein
The project is reminiscent of that Honey pump and the earth telephone from Joseph Beuys. It is an underground hypnosis that the viewer is captured and modified in return by the viewer. The ubiquitous microbes that make up the tooth of the representing time, consuming everything, alienating everything in color in patinaions, are made using microscopes and computer technologies in the viewer’s perception horizons. In one word: This artistic project is not postmodern, it is a product of the times, a guide through the 21st century.
— Wolfgang E. Krumbein
Sabine Kacunko’s photographic works possess a fragility and simultaneously a hardness like that of black porcelain; solid-coloured, not painted, to stick with the comparison. It is no contradiction that this hardness is ambivalent and undoubtedly has poetic dimensions, just as fragility does not rule out stringency and determination. Refusal to compromise, artistic radicality in the best sense, are the spiritual-sensual ravines that force both poles to closure.
— Klaus Flemming
Through the medium of a camera lense and the hermetic alchemy of the dark-room, the artefact materializes. It attains its superelevation through its place in the scenario, informed both by the manner of its handiwork and its visionary stylisation. It contains all that words and thought seek to express, in toto. Moreover, it confronts the viewer plainly with a complete visual impression of almost physical immediacy – while it remains just a fiction on a flat surface.