This interactive clock shows the current time. I was inspired by the look of digital displays from the 80s and John Maeda’s Reactive Books.
Hours: blue
Minutes: orange
Seconds: green
Programmed with Processing JS.
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.
“… we can easily recognize many religious motifs, images of saints and depictions of the Mother of God and the infant Jesus. The artist begins to interweave these with photographs from her own past. In a fascinating way, she combines living people she herself knows, such as her own mother, and interweaves them with the Mother of God, placing her in the center or putting a different, larger head on the depiction of the saint, which is irritating and leaves me amazed at the ease with which this seems to succeed. (…) The child, the infant Jesus, is exchanged with perhaps the brother or someone else and it becomes comprehensible for all of us that the infant can only develop with trust in its mother. (…) The artist also shows us that this cannot always succeed by allowing robotic demons to emerge, by completely blackening and veiling the mother, by building a multitude of disturbances into the relationship and we sense that we ourselves carry an enormous number of disturbances within us. “ Helm Zirkelbach on 24.04.2016, opening speech for the exhibition “Ansichtssache”
Can a mother love her son more than her daughter? Is there a special relationship between a mother and her son? The exaltation of male offspring and the devaluation of female offspring takes place primarily in patriarchal societies, but here too, albeit subliminally. What is remarkable, however, is that it is often the mothers themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.
In 2015, I worked on a postcard from my collection every day – most of them with the motif “Mary with the baby Jesus”, the archetype of all mother-son relationships. In the end there were 365 collages about motherhood and childhood.
This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with her and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition Ansichtssache (Point of View) in Münsingen.
Virtual tour through the exhibition.
For centuries, the image type of the “Black Madonna” has been deeply rooted in Christian popular belief, and even today, believers make pilgrimages to these images of grace, which can be found all over the world, but especially in Europe. In the spirit of this tradition, I am looking for new content for this old type of image in my work “Nocturna”.
The title Nocturna (Latin: nocturnal) is a metaphor for the dark, the hidden, the mysterious. In contrast to her models, however, this Madonna is actually “black”, for her facial features point to an African origin. For humans as visual beings, colours have always had a strong symbolic power. Black, for example, represents the bad, the evil, while the colour white stands for purity and the good. According to this principle, people are often judged by the colour of their skin. The question of the “right” skin colour was and still is the reason for hatred, persecution and wars. It determines social status and economic success within societies.
With this work I would like to honour the “black Madonna” as a holy woman of colour.
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.
A co-operation project with Antje Fischer
This booklet was created as a “dialogue” between two artists. It was sent back and forth several times by post for further processing. In this way it underwent constant changes through pasting, painting and other techniques. “Mine” and “Yours” became more and more blurred until they finally merged into one.
In the same way, a “twin” (not identical) was created, which remained with the artist Antje Fischer.
There is a mental state called melancholy, gloom, or causeless sadness. This can be debilitating or a driving force. While melancholy was once celebrated as an artist’s muse, today it is underestimated and tabooed under the name “depression.”
The series feeling blue today shows photographic snapshots filtered through the melancholic gaze (blue in the meaning of melancholic or sad). The filter levels are symbolized by windows and water surfaces, which only allow a limited view through, as well as reflections and shadow images, which distort reality. The technical realization was done by means of cyanotype, whose typical hue is blue.
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Urban Landscapes is the title of a series of snapshots of urban life: reflecting shop windows, asphalt, pigeons, hurrying passers-by, house facades, gates – unnoticed still lives.
