Heide Hinrichs inhabits a world of ambiguities and contradictory phenomena in a state of controlled eruption. The artist is a storyteller and her repertoire consists of short momentary forms, flashes of past emotions, folded mental states and half-uttered gestures, arranged carefully though spontaneously in anthologies of parables and allegoric verses. Her formal equilibristic, which includes uncannily charming and precise mastering of diverse shapes and multiply materials is a rare quality of both post-minimal and neo-baroque stylistics. Textures and volumes but also scale and colors contribute to multisensory tactile and organic experience. Hinrichs invents imaginary topographies peopled by her favorite personages of librarians, astronomers and clowns, where childhood memories collide with the wounds of maturity, and the carnivalesque conspires with the scientific in navigating through the vernacular landscapes of expectations and hopes.

Her “Expected Obedience of Your Thoughts”, a voluminous installation composed of a variety of fragmentary, excavation-like trophies out of, amongst others, clay, rubber, tissue, papier mache and wood, is a cocoon of transitory ephemeral identity and a capsule of time yet to come. Appropriating a quasi-ethnographic cabinet de curiosite style, Hinrichs creates a psychic environment of anticipation: new suns appear on a horizon and a falling star is the last constitution of a melting existence into a unknown future to come. This melancholic state, suspended between the void and the plenty, in a gap between a ruin and construction site, takes on a therapeutic charge in dealing with loss, memory and traumas of (subjective) histories.

Adam Budak
in Manifesta 7 Index 2008