TIGHT INTO A BALL
(english edition)

Katrien de Blauwer turned to the photography magazines in Karl Lagerfeld’s library at 7L as both source and mirror. Drawn to a particular period – the late 1920s and into the 1930s – she found herself moving through frozen images of people mid- transformation : bodies compressed into legibility by the camera, lives fixed onto paper. Working though a Woolfian lens, she made a series of work that borrows these figures to tell a story that is, as usual, personal. The title of the installation comes from a single line taken from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931): «Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball.« Six paper balls – one for each of Virginia Woolf’s six characters – are installed in the space. Around them, on the walls, the twenty-nine photomontages unfold, tracing the same arcas the novel itself, a single day, from sunrise to sunset.