Questions (After Brecht)

During the summers of 2017 and 2018, Karen Knorr was given a carte blanche to photograph the building site of the disused Art-Deco Department store in Paris, La Samaritaine. The resulting photographs, infused with playful fantasy and surrealism, were taken with a large format camera and transformed with solarization. They are accompanied by lines from Brecht’s poem: Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935). These photographs record and document a labour in progress, yet the construction workers have exited and the building is built as if by magic.