Sarah Bildstein’s work deals with the phenomenon of alienation. With the progressive digitization of our world, a central aspect of her work is the observation of slow changes and the material-immanent properties of things and their interplay with the material environment. In Bilbao, she started experimenting with relations between water and colour to determine the parameters for a 100 part series of chromatographies, consisting of 100 different samples of water from all over the world. Water is a sensitive indicator of an imbalance in nature and natural resource distribution, through the human-led factors of industrialization and economic development. In the separation process of chromatography, the colour particles are structured by the evaporation of water. The process takes a few days until eventually, structures emerge that resemble beings rising from out of the water. These amorphous forms are reminiscent of a resonant worldview that offers a potential counter-strategy to alienated world conditions. The series thus addresses the relationship between historical and cultural processes in a world shaped by capitalistic logic. By using seawater from the Atlantic for the very first time, she is taking into account the specificities of this space.
Sarah Bildstein was born in Austria and holds a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her work concerns metaphor, abstraction and the observation of the alienated subject at the interface of the post-industrial age and consumer culture. She is concerned with the possibilities of abstraction within discourses of alienation. Her practice is influenced by the politics of aesthetic methods and reacts to site-specific and thematic contexts.