Artist Statement

Sandra Erbacher examines the systems through which institutions make people and histories legible. Her interdisciplinary practice traces the operations of measurement, classification, representation, and discipline across archives, bureaucratic systems, scientific and psychological testing, images of war, and the designed environments of institutional life.

Central to the work is the body as a site of institutional knowledge. Workers are observed and optimized; intelligence is converted into scores; bodies are measured against norms; populations are organized into categories; photographs become historical evidence. Erbacher is interested in how these seemingly neutral procedures produce distinctions between normal and abnormal, fit and unfit, valuable and disposable, visible and invisible.

Working with archival materials, found images, administrative objects, sculpture, collage, video, text, and installation, Erbacher appropriates the aesthetic languages through which institutional knowledge acquires authority: the grid, the archive, the questionnaire, the diagram, the photograph, the office, and the exhibition itself.

Rather than making these systems more transparent, her work often interferes with their demand for legibility. Images are excised, information obscured, classifications rearranged, scales altered, sequences interrupted, and disparate histories brought into proximity. Through these acts of reorganization and refusal, Erbacher examines the instability of the systems that claim to make bodies, intelligence, and history knowable.