Karin Sander at Annka Kultis Gallery

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition by leading German artist Karin Sander. Featuring her new video work 696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026), the exhibition continues Sander’s established conceptual practice of intervening in and transforming environments and structures. It marks the artist’s return to London following her 2016 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and her first solo show with ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY, a leading champion of new-media and digital art.

Karin Sander is an acclaimed conceptual artist who lives and works across Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany. Across a career spanning three decades, her extensive œuvre has encompassed a multitude of media, including sculpture, performance, architecture, photography and video. Her work is conceptual in the way that it often employs existing objects, spaces and environments, which are transformed through minimal intervention to alter perspectives on the familiar and everyday in the institutional environment. Following a major career retrospective at Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland, this exhibition continues Sander’s longstanding engagement with technological practices.

696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026) is a five-minute moving image work that depicts a community of ants moving to-and-fro along the ledge of a railing against a blue sky, filmed by the artist. Compositionally, the picture plane consists of stark verticals and horizontals with the railing occupying the majority of the frame. Against this fixed architectural structure, the eye is drawn to the organic movement of the ants as they scurry backwards and forwards in and out of view, chaotic and organised at one and the same time. The scene shares a striking resemblance to traffic or people moving across elevated highways in dense urban spaces, recreated in miniature form. Unlike city congestion, however, the ants cluster, collide and crawl on top of each other, despite their reputation as a highly organised, purposeful insect society. Perhaps the work may invite contemplation on parallels between animal and human forms of social organisation.

A comical element is introduced with a Schoenbergian atonal keyboard soundtrack consisting of syncopated notes that seem to punctuate the ants’ collisions, in a manner reminiscent of the use of musical accompaniment to amplify moments of disorder in early screen comedy. Parallels can also be drawn to Pierre Huyghe’s gallery intervention Umwelt (2011), which similarly brought ants into the institutional environment, asking audiences to envisage non-human ecosystems.

Additionally, Sander often includes a large scale wall-based vinyl bearing the coordinates of the presenting location. At nearly 2 metres wide, it purposefully asserts its presence within the architecture, conceptually reinforcing Sander’s well-known and longstanding practice of site-specific installation.

696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026) is a work that is both playful and thought-provoking. The minimal interventions of the artist, such as the framing of the video, the backdrop of blue sky with cotton white clouds and the introduction of a soundtrack, turn a common sight into a contemplative artistic encounter. In such a way, the exhibition presented by ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is a striking reminder of the artist’s groundbreaking conceptual approach to environment, architecture and digital media.

By Georgia Gerson

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