Mathilda Abker: Shared Views – How Visitors Interpret Artworks Without Context

“The best thing about art is this: You have a picture, and you can have a thousand different perspectives—divided perspectives.”

With this sentence, a visitor sums up the essence of the current exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. The exhibition *Shared Perspectives*, created in collaboration with the KiCo Collection, is dedicated to the diverse forms of collaboration, separation, and joint creation. Within this overarching concept, a specific room focuses on the theme of shared work, where Karin Sander’s “Mailed Paintings” meet Tomás Saraceno’s delicate spiderweb-like installations.

The room features two works by Karin Sander on one wall and two large paintings by Tomas Saraceno on the opposite wall. Another work by Saraceno, housed in a Plexiglas cube, floats near the entrance to the room. To explore how this curatorial approach reveals itself without pre-established explanations, all wall labels were covered up as part of an educational experiment. Visitors were thus guided from an unbiased first encounter through to the unveiling of the wall texts. Through the viewers’ various viewpoints, a spectrum of different perspectives is revealed.

A first, unbiased look compels visitors to engage visually and through association. Details such as the DHL tape on one of Sanders’ works provide food for thought:

“It reminded me a little bit of a package. […] You can send gifts and order things.”
“And a DHL package. That’s obvious.”

At the same time, the black packing tape on the “Mailed Paintings” is also recognized as a motif of separation; terms such as “window,” “cut,” and “partial surface” are mentioned:
“For me, that’s a shared plane. It can mean different things to me. It can be time, it can be space, or it can be people who are shared.”

The surface of Sanders’ works speaks for itself. Through their rough texture and signs of wear, the audience interprets her images as objects that “tell of something that has undergone a division.” These signs of wear also evoke the concepts of movement and interconnectedness:
“A symbol of movement and travel from one place to another.”

In the same way, the shape of the canvas also guides our associations:
“A wheel as a symbol of actual movement, of transportation, of moving something,” remarks a visitor standing in front of one of Sanders’ circular works.

These reactions make it clear which specific details—from shape and texture to the packing tape—guide our perception and shape our interpretation. Although the audience had already been able to form associations related to transport, separation, and movement, the true essence of the curatorial concept remained hidden at this point.

Looking at Tomás Saraceno’s works opens up entirely different realms of association:
“There’s something organic about it. Cells, spores, something like that.”
“A fine hairline crack in the glass or in the ice.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of there being a kind of divide, but one you can hardly sense […] like a very, very small crack.”
“It’s very complex; it’s made up of very small parts. No two shapes are exactly alike.”

It’s rare for visitors to immediately recognize that these are spiderwebs upon first glance. Nevertheless, there are interpretations such as “everything is somehow interwoven” or even very specific descriptions like “webs made by a spider I’d really rather not encounter.”

The range of different approaches remains fascinating: Some describe purely the formal language, while others make free associations or observe the spatial relationships between the structures:

“It’s very fragile, somehow […] there’s an effort to come together. It’s sort of together, but somehow still divided.”

Both Sanders’ and Saraceno’s works reveal a genuine sense of being overwhelmed by the task of interpreting this conceptual art entirely without context. One visitor admits with a smile:
“I still have a huge question mark in my head.”

As the titles are gradually revealed, most visitors’ uncertainty gives way to enthusiasm. Saraceno has real spiders—some of different species—weave one after another in the same room. Sander, on the other hand, primes canvases white and sends them unprotected by mail from one exhibition venue to another, with the respective title ultimately emerging from the various locations. The signs of wear and tear from the logistics chains shape the work.

This revelation fundamentally shifts the perspective. The focus is no longer solely on the artist’s own signature style, but rather on the process of sharing. The respondents’ reactions reflect precisely this insight into the role of postal routes and animal participants:
“It all fits together perfectly: on the one hand, the mail and the transport route managed by human hands; on the other, the spider’s web as a natural transport system in space.”

The term “interconnection” came up frequently in the discussions, as it describes, on the one hand, the interconnections within supply chains, but can also be applied to the actual interconnections in Saraceno’s works. In Sander’s work, interconnection takes place hidden in the background, whereas in Saraceno’s work, it constitutes the very essence of his art:
“It really shows just how interconnected we all are: people, supply chains, but also animals and nature. It’s like a web that spans everything.”

The discussions also touched on the concept of authorship and its applicability to everyday life:
“The fascinating thing is that the artist completely relinquishes control. The work comes about through chance, through the process of transport, or through whatever the spider happens to be doing at that moment.”
“It makes you think about how many people or stakeholders are involved in the things we see every day without giving it a second thought.”
“It’s kind of like that in a family, too. Everyone gets assigned tasks […]. Sometimes we get annoyed because we have to take out the trash… And that’s how the whole big picture comes together.”

In numerous responses, the gradual unveiling was automatically followed by a personal assessment of the mediation experiment and its impact on one’s own perception:
“The fact that nature or circumstances are given so much room to help shape the work—I would never have seen that in it without the text.”
“To be honest, without the sign, I was lost. But now it really clicks.”
“It’s like a little rush of happiness when you finally understand it.”

It becomes clear that being provided with contextual information does not mean that one’s own observation becomes worthless. The wall text does not replace personal discovery; rather, it simply lays out another trail. It provides a starting point without closing off the space for free thought. Ultimately, we come to realize that engaging with art is always a dialogue—between one’s own associations, the artists’ ideas, the ways these are realized in an exhibition concept, and the many perspectives in between. It is, in short, a space for a thousand possibilities and shared perspectives.

Mathilda Abker