15.10.—15.11.2026

Dorothee Sauter (Switzerland, 1956, lives in Basel) emerged as a ceramic artist in the 1980s. She has lived in the United States for a number of years but is now working out of Switzerland again.

Kohta has invited her to show recent ceramic sculptures in the studio gallery. Her exhibition ‘Walking the Unknown’, which we are very happy to host, is part of our new collaboration with the organisation PF25 cultural projects in Basel and its founder and co-director, Hong Kong-born curator Angelika Li. It is also the second part of a mini-series started at PF25 in Dornach outside Basel last spring.

In her curatorial note for the exhibition at Kohta, Angelika Li writes:

Dorothee Sauter’s ceramic creatures awaken curiosity and emotion. This sensibility has unfolded through her previous solo exhibitions, ‘Geology, Cooking Heart, Curious, and Other Stories’ (2021) and ‘Tumbling through Time’ (2023).

The title ‘Walking the Unknown’ could hardly be more timely. Part I took place at PF25 cultural projects in Dornach, Switzerland, on a hillside open to the surrounding mountain landscape. There, the sculptures appeared to walk together across a reflective surface, as if accompanied by their own shifting reflections.

Part II carries this movement to Helsinki, whose coastline opens onto the Bay of Finland and the archipelago. The reflections of water and sky evoke a world in flux: expansive, fragile and unpredictable. In this first solo presentation in Finland the gallery, painted deep coral, gathers this wider atmosphere into an immediate encounter with the sculptures.

Sauter’s fascination with geology forms a distinctive current within her practice. Surfaces resembling scar tissue, healed yet marked. These beings exist simultaneously as organisms and landscapes, singular presences within a wider ecology. They draw us towards what came before: prehistoric life, the formation of humanity and the persistence of memory, all recurring currents within Sauter’s enquiry into being.

Literature has long nourished Sauter’s imagination. Among her significant influences is Ursula K. Le Guin. In The Word for World Is Forest (1972), conceived against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Le Guin unfolds a narrative shaped by the pursuit of freedom and the centrality of dream. She imagines a language in which ‘world’ and ‘forest’ are synonymous, collapsing the distinction between environment and existence. This resonates with Taoist thought, in which human beings are not positioned above nature but coexist within the same field of life.

In Sauter’s creatures, matter has a mind of its own. Clay remembers. Landscape breathes. What appears individual is also collective. The creatures walking together across a reflective path in the earlier exhibition feel like beings on a threshold, arriving from what might be called dream time, a dimension beyond linear chronology where memory, myth and intuition coexist.

Naming carries another narrative rhythm through the works, as titles echo poetically across Sauter’s sculpture.

Among the works in Helsinki, five are shown for the first time. Proliferation 2 and Proliferation 3 (2021–25) stand as companion forms, branching outwards in a shared, tentative gesture. The reddish brown surfaces are marked by small pits, cavities and irregular openings. This texture emerged through what might be described as a ‘misapplication’ of an industrial glaze originally designed to imitate the famous Chinese oxblood glaze. The forms suggest fragile life forms poised between growth and resilience, reaching towards an as yet unknown future.

Water Dancer II (2021–25) turns this outward energy inwards through a more enclosed, circular form. Its title pays tribute to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2019 novel The Water Dancer, where history and magical realism are interwoven to explore memory, family separation and the longing for freedom. The novel’s protagonist, Hiram Walker, possesses Conduction, a power through which water and memory open passages across distance, reconnecting people separated by slavery. This magical force resonates with the uncanny sense of life in Sauter’s creatures, whose forms seem at once earthly and otherworldly.

Commemoration 1 and Commemoration 2 (2025) draw the group into more vertical, concentrated forms. Their porous, weathered surfaces resemble trunks, bones or remnants from an unknown landscape, extending the sense of a living terrain shaped by memory and ritual.

Dream reporter 3 (2025) appears to be in motion already, a walking mind shaped by experience and adversity. Its pink, squarish body, extended through multiple limbs, evokes migration, not as spectacle but as a condition.

Belly Time 1 and 2 (2025) emerge from the kiln with fresh green and pink vitality. Tubular, sprouting and ambiguous, they are neither tree, coral nor organ, yet resonate with all three.

The titles Cooking Heart (2021), Traveler 1 (2022) and Vagrant 2 (2025) suggest free spirits. The first two works are energised by vibrant industrial green pigment, while all three share a subtle science fiction sensibility. Their names are not labels that confine, but companions that drift alongside the works.

Although literary references enter through some titles, Sauter has remarked that her work doesn’t refer directly to a particular story. It may come from the hand, the belly or the mind’s eye. There is no desire to impose an idea. The first gesture is to remain quiet and listen to what the works might reveal. They stand together without hierarchy, leaning gently towards one another as a small collective ecology. The works inhabit a space between waking and dream.

Curator: Angelika Li
Curator at Kohta: Anders Kreuger
Collaboration with PF25 cultural projects, Basel
Patronage from the Embassy of Switzerland, Helsinki