“People take photos of each other
To prove that they really existed
To make sure they are there
People take photos of each other
Believing that those moments
Would stay alive for all time”
Excerpt from: Menschen Machen Fotos gegenseitig, Die goldenen Zitronen (Songtext)
2013,
Photo album, different papers, acryl, gaze,
34 x 21 x 6 cm,
video 2:20 min, mp4-file, aspect ratio 16:9,
Limited edition: 5 + 2 AP, available.
An old family album is filled with personal spiritual connections to the past: letters, pictures, words…. It is an attempt to reconstruct the past with the means of the present. But how much truth is there in it? And how much utopia?
The greater the distance in time and place to the past, the more the truth is reduced to the essential – a metaphor about space and time, about home and childhood.
The headscarf is a symbol. It tells of femininity and oppression, of tradition and religion, of yesterday and tomorrow. The headscarf plays an important role in many societies. In fact, the black headscarf is the most striking thing I remember from my childhood as a member of the German minority in Romania. It was a visible sign of marriage and “Germanness”. The headscarf still accompanies me in my life today: socially, politically, personally.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
2014,
collage, frottage, photo album, photographs, acrylic paint, various papers, wax,
34 x 21 x 6 cm,
The photo album is a metaphor of doubting one’s own existence – a documentation of traces that becomes worthless when no one remembers the stories behind the pictures. I bought this photo album at the flea market and re-stocked it – an archive of traces with stories that open up to each viewer in their own way.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
2014, photo album, photography, mixed media, wax, 27 x 19 x 8 cm
A surface is the outer shell of an object. A surface envelops, protects and conceals secrets. The leather cover of a book or photo album is, literally, the skin that protects the pages and thus also the contents. Since the invention of the camera, it has become a tradition in the Western world to preserve the collective memory of a family in photo albums and thus document one’s own origins. It was passed on from generation to generation.
However, the collective memory does not last (Aleida Assmann) and after three generations it has changed so much that a family album can lose its ideal value. I buy such family albums, which have obviously become worthless, at virtual flea markets. I dissolve their collective memory in order to create a new, universal one.
In this work I invite the viewer to cast their voyeuristic gaze into an unknown photo album. Page by page, layer by layer, he penetrates deeper beneath the surface of a cryptic narrative – a story that opens up to everyone in a different way.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
2013,
Photoalbum, collage, mixed media on cardboard,
34 x 21 x 6 cm,
Art Award of the town of Krumbach,
Collection Mittelschwäbisches Heimatmuseum Krumbach,
This work is based on the statement:
“Home, once lost, is always somewhere else.” EKH
The focus is on the search for a place of identification and belonging. I describe it as a long car ride with no destination. For every apparent arrival makes one painfully aware that home is not where one has been looking for it.
The starting point consists of historical photographs and my own, taken primarily from a moving car. The images have been edited and given a digital “patina.” As a result, present and remembered visual states, as well as documentary and fictional layers, overlap.
Exhibition History:
2013 – Krumbach, Mittelschwäbisches Heimatmuseum, KULT!
2013 – Luleå / SE, Norrbottenmuseum, X-Border Art Biennial
