Daniel Gustav Cramer

Death Valley in California is a place of extreme heat and dryness. A few years ago, when Daniel Gustav Cramer spent several days in the northern part of the US national park, he noticed a coyote passing his bungalow every morning at roughly the same time. The artist photographed the animal in the early light of dawn, noticing how it seemed completely unfazed by the human observation of its daily routine. Some years after this encounter with the coyote, Cramer spotted a fox moving through the wintery twilight from the balcony of his Berlin apartment. The fox slipped through a hole in a fence across the street, crossed the road, and eventually disappeared between parked cars. Cramer realized that the fox and the coyote shared a striking resemblance. As in a seemingly random circular motion, two distant places became connected through these two animals.

With Fox & Coyote, Cramer brings the wild Californian animal to Berlin as part of a sprawling, citywide installation in which images of the coyote are distributed across the city. From these scattered images, a cohesive yet shifting “sculptural object” is created within the urban thicket. In addition to the circular parcours of the venues of the 13th Berlin Biennale, this emotional cartography of the coyote forms a spatially expansive conceptual whole that only materializes as a sculpture in the minds of the viewers.

Text: Kito Nedo