Artist Statement
Beate Sonnenberg builds physical environments in her studio, arrangements of light, reflective surfaces, and industrial materials and records them as photographs and video. Construction and camera are a single act. The lens does not document what has been made; it completes it. The starting point is always interior. A thought, an experience, something felt but not yet fully formed. Sonnenberg builds in order to see it. What emerges is neither the object nor the image but something in between, a space where physical construction and optical perception collapse into one another. Her work sits outside conventional categories. It is not photography in the documentary sense, nor installation in the spatial sense. It is a practice concerned with what becomes visible when you look long enough at light, at form, at the distance between what you construct and what the camera reveals. Her current bodies of work, UNFOLD and Attention, continue this investigation. Both begin with questions she cannot yet answer. That is the only requirement.