Questions (After Brecht)

During the summers of 2017 and 2018, Karen Knorr wasgiven a carte blanche to photograph the building siteof the disused Art-Deco Department store in Paris, LaSamaritaine. The resulting photographs, infused withplayful fantasy and surrealism, were taken with a largeformat camera and transformed with solarization.They are accompanied by lines from Brecht’s poem:Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935). Thesephotographs record and document a labour inprogress, yet the construction workers have exited andthe building is built as if by magic.