Since 2008, Nadia Kaabi-Linke has recorded impressions of her surroundings through physical contact, pressing one surface against another to create imprints. Capturing traces of human presence that might otherwise slip through the cracks of history, she has documented sites such as a graffiti-covered wall in her birthplace of Tunis (Rue El Azafine, 2008) or a marred and bullet-ridden façade in Berlin (Am Hegelplatz, 2009), her adopted city of residence since 2006.
Kaabi-Linke approaches her silent subjects with curiosity and sensitivity, getting to know them through close interaction with their surfaces. Like a printmaker, she coaxes details into view by applying pressure, only the markings that she captures are not her own. At the point of encounter, as she sets her support (tissue paper, transfer film, plaster, or another carrier) against a chosen surface, layers of histories begin to reveal themselves.
Berlin à fleur de peau (2010) offers an especially poignant example of Kaabi-Linke’s approach to the imprint. For the making of this work, she operated as a “print taker,” chronicling a series of untold stories from the dark corners of various transit depots in Berlin. Drawing upon traditional offset techniques but using the tools of a forensic scientist, the artist collected chance compositions found on subway car windows and bus shelters throughout the city.
She worked mostly at night, when such locations were less populated (and, likely, when many of the original markings were made), demarcating specific areas of study by dusting surfaces with black velvet powder—the same material used by detectives investigating a crime scene. As the powder clung to gouges, scrawls, and other uneven parts of the surfaces, like printing ink seeping into an engraved line, it also adhered to oils on the surface left by human skin, revealing a previously hidden array of incidental body prints.
To capture these newly manifest compositions and allow them to exist beyond their original sites, Kaabi-Linke used film liner as a matrix—the same type of protection film made to prevent scratching and graffiti on such heavily trafficked surfaces in the first place. With the film, she picked up the clusters of powder and transferred them to clear acrylic panels that operate today as eerie surrogates for the subway windows and other glass surfaces whose markings they now hold.
Kaabi-Linke’s work is site-specific in its direct relationship to particular places, even as it exists outside of these locales, in a transferred state made up of indexical marks that unite visible and formerly invisible traces. Further underscoring the uncanny relationship between the primary site and its imprint, the eleven panels that make up Berlin à fleur de peau are displayed as a row of objects rather than traditional wall works, propped just off the wall on a makeshift ledge of protruding nails. The transparent quality of the acrylic and the slight remove from the gallery wall creates shadows and other visual noise that hinder our ability to fix the compositions in space, turning the markings on the surface into a tangle of imperceptible layers.
The title of the work—Berlin à fleur de peau—is as deeply layered and multivalent as the final compositions, standing in for some of the critical issues in Kaabi-Linke’s work as a whole. The phrase à fleur de, examined on its own, carries both spatial and temporal connotations, suggesting a material flush with another and also one that is on the brink of an encounter or revelation—a perfect allusion to the moment of the imprint that is so central to Kaabi-Linke’s practice.
The full title, loosely translated as “Berlin on edge,” draws on the French expression avoir les nerfs à fleur de peau (to feel one’s nerves close to the skin), endowing the work with a psyche that might be characterized as unstable or ready to explode. Indeed, on one of the panels in Berlin à fleur de peau, an impression of a forearm and hand—languidly resting alongside a train window perhaps—is interrupted by a violent shatter mark, recording an impact that literally fractured the original surface.
Similarly representing a visual tension between aggression and docility, another panel presents a large fragment of swooping graffiti, a more modest patch of frenetically scrawled letters made with a knife or other sharp implement, and a haunting partial print of a face exuding such stillness that even the creases at the corner of the eye are legible. While the sum total of markings captured on each panel could have originated from the same individual—suggesting that a vandal might even be identified by the body prints left behind on the “crime scene”—these complex visual fields ultimately deny such parsing of layers, collapsing time in space.
Kim Conaty is the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.