THE BLUE BOOK contains work from this studio residency in Almada/Lisbon which you can find here and a selection of my English poems, revolving around the element of water, the feminine, creation, sensuality, memory and dream... (current status: at the printer, out soon)

THE BLUE BOOK is a verbal and

visual journey of memory,

dream, senses, of water, feeling,

spirit.

In a way it´s also a songbook.

It contains music, not only within the

words and images but also between

the lines, the music of space vibrating.

Waves of sound.

This publication is an ode to the

element of water, to the feminine,

sensuality and after all also to poetry.

~~

Sometimes the images are poems,

sometimes the poems are images.

It´s just as fluid as water itself.

More info about details and price HERE

Prints on satin, golden brass bars
Flags ca. 95 x 60 cm, Brass bar 2 m

 Flags are generally associated with or a signal of a union of individual people forming a certain community or believing in the same cause.

The flags for TRUE are prints of selected videostills of the eponymous video. In the form of the textile print they get a real, a true physical body again, they transform from digital pixel to haptic materiality again, yet they are not rigid as there is movement inherent in the light fabric and as a flag they can be set in motion and get activated through people using them.

The selected stills for the flags are all featuring a sentence or word/hashtag from which the visitor can choose what resonates most with them and what kind of „truth“ they want to join or become part of resp. demonstrate for.

#hope
#revolution
#we will need another

The flags also can get combined to form new ideas like „We will need another – Revolution“.

The images are featuring the back of a woman as well as stills from the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone has other associations with these images in combination with these specific words, for everyone there emerge different thoughts, feelings and „truths“.

My „cause“, my truth is believing in the power of peaceful constructiveness and the idea that revolutions start within ourselves, with becoming more conscious and working on our attitude/posture.

So with this work I want to actively engage people to experience what it means to march around with a well visible word or truth they chose, they decided for, they decided to identify with. What does it do to them, how does it feel?

Usually also when we carry a flag we do that with a certain posture, we don´t march with our head bowed but rather standing up straight with a certain (self-)confidence as we stand behind the message or purpose. Here the idea that I´m exploring in my video „TRUE“ comes full circle again and connects back with the thoughts that inspired it.

Aluminium frame, print on velvet
45 cm x 60 cm

Like an object of devotion the imagery reminds of a saint´s relic or pictures in churches or chapels resp. the central image behind an altar.

In its center is the so called no-joint (the union of the first two vertebrae of our spine that enable us to turn our head and signalize: No.) surrounded by a variety of handmade, precious plumb bobs (that measure if something is true/straight in terms of position). Through the special aesthetic the objects get charged with the aura of something that is sacred.

 HD Video & Photographic Objects

Bodies. Containing time. Meaning. Shifting. Over time.

The hollow backside of the cast of a column detail we see on the photos of "Figure (Spine)" resp. also in scenes of "TRUE" serves as the stage for a hypnotic repetition of slightly changing verses, resembling a counting-out-rhyme. The pendulum is an old plummet used mostly in construction to get vertical lines straight/true.

Anatomical model, metal, wax
8 cm x 9 cm

The union of the anatomical model of the „no-joint“ (= first two vertebrae of the spine), the soft pink wax which reminds of organic flesh and the shiny golden metal parts which hint to the prolongation of the spine become something like a hybrid statement jewellery.

 In a passage of the video TRUE we hear a voice comparing our neck/spine with precious jewellery that we have to guard as others might try to "steal" it, meaning people try to impose their own truths on us when we lack the backbone to say NO.

Digital Print, lacquer, ink
88,5 cm x 122 cm

„If people think you are crazy you can easily tell the truth... – if you are an artist you can easily tell the truth, can´t you...?“

Print on Satin
58 cm x 81 cm

Verità (Remix) is a digital collage that samples elements of the video TRUE, „behind the scene“-photos of the artist´s studio as well as symbols connected to the subject. It´s an expression oft he mysterious nature of truth and its complex layers.

Intervention in hotel room and 2 resulting photographs (as posters).

Figure (Spine), 2017
Photography

The photo series „Figure (Spine)“ got amongst others inspired by my research for my videowork „TRUE“. When I came across the caryatides (the female counterpart of the male figures carrying structures in architecture – the most famous ones are probably the ones of the Akropolis in Athens) I was intrigued immediately.

For me the caryatide embodies an image of a women who tackles something, is strong and is supporting. I found her erotic and emancipated at the same time.

Moreover through visits in different cities and many walks I had been thinking a lot about the “(un)/organic” quality of architecture, how it often seemed physical and almost “human” and sometimes very repulsing or unwelcoming.

So I was interested in merging human body and architectonic element to a performative sculpture suggesting one of the caryatids got alive and independent from her rigid surrounding structure.

The video “TRUE” is part of a larger project in the course of which I´m developing diverse works in various media relating to the topic of truth.

HD Video, color, sound, 6.45 Min. (Loop)
Photos

In "Asylum" the house is explored as a metaphor for ourselves and the "houses" we live in – in a psychological sense. The narration oscillates between physical and mental/psychological body/architecture. It´s questioning the boundaries of reality and vision, of sanity and insanity and questions the concept of these terms.

Own footage is alternating with archival found footage whose context the viewer can guess but not know for sure. It charges the artist´s own footage with further meaning, appearing and disappearing like ephemeral visions.

We hear voices, but we don´t see anyone speaking. The lo-fi-sound supports the impression of a dreamlike atmosphere. What´s real, what´s imagination? Who erected these walls?

Walls stand for a non-direct violence, the violence of exclusion. 
Visions are windows, hopes are windows. “Asylum” suggests that the act of restoration starts with trusting in our – real or unrealistic – hope(s). 

Video/Animation, color, sound, 5 Min. (Loop)
& 2 Flags with the poem

time vs. time
chance vs. chance

Street noise, voices and inmidst all of that (an unknown environment we can only imagine) we hear a female voice reading a poem. It´s about speed, it´s about (our) time, it´s about desires, longings...

The static image is slowly moving, tilting, the sculpture-like clock is sinking down, like a ship. A woman reading is trying to stop it...
Sometimes the finger of the clock seems to move but it´s not. It´s another kind of force that is triggering that imagination of movement.

2 Channel Installation, HD-Video, b&w, sound, 6.50 Min. (Loop)

Short
M(O)USE is questioning the role of subject/object, reflecting affection/relationships (to others/ to art) in our digital age. It`s about surfaces & superficial satisfaction and inspired by iconic video-works like “Art must be beautiful” (Abramovic) and “Fly” (Y. Ono).

The title refers to a muse which can either be the digital male torso or myself as the performer but also to the technical device, the computer mouse, that serves as an almost prosthetic extension of our body, to perform everything: even the intimate, the touch. There is an interdependency between the screen that mirrors the movement of the performer (in the form of the computer hand symbol). The work is also hinting at art and the artist as economic objects rather than someone/thing to love (and in this way to economically perform). The power relations between object-subject can be looked at from diverse angles. It´s constantly in flux who has what role, who is in control of whom, in t his game of virtual and real. Even more, when an observing public is becoming part of that intimate correspondence.

Installed/Presented at
2016 Proyector Videoart Festival, Madrid
2016 FUSO Videoart-Festival, MAAT, Lisboa
2015 Femmes' Video Art Festival 2, Los Angeles
2015 ONE – AN/OTHER, Muratcentoventidue, Bari

3 Channel Installation, HD-Video, color, sound, 8.07 Min. (Loop)
Photos

A shuttered room, somewhere. There is the air of an arena. The chairs on the tables suggest a ghostly audience. It´s not so clear what´s dream and what´s real, what´s memory and what´s actually happening. The division in 3 channels supports the spatial aspect as well as the relationship of 3 people.

Read more on vimeo

2-Channel-Installation, HD Video, sound, b&w, 4.10 Min. (Loop)

MOTHER TONGUE is about the very special relationship between mother and daughter and about reclaiming our animal heritage. It is also about exploring our senses in a different way and (re)discovering actions beyond their societal interpretation.

Cats and other animals lick the faces and bodies of their kids and vice versa to show their love and also as a cleaning ritual. A ritual that also means legacy. The cat has always been seen as an animal connected to motherhood and is a creature associated with women as myths, stories and images show.

I was interested what happens if this behaviour is transferred into the human world. As licking often has a sexual connotation in our society it seems odd and maybe almost incestious what is basically an act of purity. Only as society is influencing and restricting our thinking and behaviour we suppose there´s something wrong. That arises the question how strongly we´re influenced by codes of conduct that determine how we read gestures. It shows how difficult it is to overcome notions of how things are and should be.

One might be confused what to do with this image as then again it´s neither sexual nor a common portrait of mother and daughter. With its ambigous, blurred or confusing message it refuses to be an economic picture and wants us to reflect on it. Other than e.g. depictions of mother and daughter do in commercial clips or advertisments.

Eventually in its simple form it is a complex nexus of performance, mother-daughter-relationship, society´s expectations, fears and affection.

Photography/Fujicolor Crystal Archive Digital Pearl paper on Aludibond, 50 x 75 cm each

Skin I & II is a result of my interest in topics as desire/rejection, seduction, digital/physical, subject/object, gaze/touch. Both gestures (mano fica and mano cornuta) are derived from the field of apotropaic rites or objects which are said to avert the evil eye resp. to function as a sign of good luck. The gestures therefore exist as lucky charms but due to their sexual origin they also bear an inherent offensive meaning and resemble sexual fetish objects.

Both hands are plaster moulds of my own hands on which I projected another photograph (a shell, held by two hands, the same as in „Exercise“) as to cover the imperfect physical objects, that show the structure of my skin but have also little cracks, with a seducing „digital skin“ that clearly shows the grid of the projected image. The ephemeral picture and the sculptural symbol become one in the photograph but the viewer´s desire to touch the hands won´t be satisfied and he gets therefore rejected as well.

Hands: Plaster
Box: Acrylic glass (blue, red bottom), 33 x 33 x 14 cm, open on one side

Hands are there to touch and be touched, if you want they are a tool to connect, they help us to feel, to grab, to understand bodies and objects. Thus hands are deeply related to various projections and desires.

These hands, plaster moulds of my own hands, even more. They form ambigous signs, one shows the „mano fica“, the other the „mano cornuta“ – both symbols for good luck or against the evil eye but at the same time also symbols that can be interpreted in an offending way as they are charged with sexual connotations as well.

The greyish plaster hands lack every sign of life and still desire is inherent in them resp. in what they symbolize.

However, also the visitor is not allowed to touch or come really close as the hands are protected by an acryl glass box that casts a cold, blue shadow on them. Blue as the longing to connect. Blue as the light of projectors before they are connected to another device.

Just one side is open and reveals that the bottom of the box is actually red. A glimpse of something different. An impression of warmth.

2 Flags with poems
Satin, Voile, Brass

ca. 60 x 48 cm (each)

In life we are used to project. In life but especially in love. In love but especially in an age where encounters happen often in the digital world before the physical world.

The blue of these two flags was taken from a photograph of the "empty" projection of a projector against a wall. Before there is a connection to anything there is just the cold blue image. To feel blue is also a well-known expression to describe a sad or lonely feeling.

The two poems are revolving around these ideas of projection, love, desire, rejection or missing connection that we often experience in the digital age.

HD-Video, color, sound, 3.50 Min. (Loop)

ONE / ANOTHER is a drama of the gaze. The viewer becomes both voyeur and object of the gaze himself/herself and is thus another protagonist, another "other" (failing to connect) in this game of relations.

The video is revolving around the issue of seeking one´s gaze resp. trying to connect and communicate through it. It´s dealing with attention and affection, distance and closeness and the relationship between one and another.

Read more on Vimeo

HD Video, color, sound, 6.50 Min. (Loop)
Series of 3 Photographs

The setting resembles an altar or a mountain – both places where offerings are made resp. that are connected to cults and myths. Also the special type of a mountain, the vulcano, is strongly associated with diverging meaning. 

You can see it as a kind of abstract fertility ritual but also as a commentary on people´s detachedness where our food is coming from. A table with a crumpled cloth becomes an abstract, eradicated, white landscape that is magically giving birth to all kinds of fruit (or spitting it out). Afterwards they get collected or harvested in a rather intimate tote or "bag" – this is where we touch on another notion of fertility.

Eventually in the performance various layers merge and so the work is fertile soil to seduce the viewer´s imagination and to make the audience reflect on topics like man/nature, womankind or the origins as well as potential of creation.

Single-Channel HD-Video, color, sound, 4.55 Min. (Loop)

MMXIII is taking place in a kind of white arena, within a fragile border, a snow white cube, on one of the first days of the new year. The video-performance is revolving around mythological ideas and references such as the one about Persephone. It strives to create an own tale about virginity, fertility and creation, man and god(ess) as well as animal, ritual, innocence, sacrifice and destruction. The red fruit originally coming from far away and warmer countries contrasts the snowy landscape, the freezing wintriness that is death to any fruitful growth.

Read more on the vimeo page

Single-Channel HD-Video, no sound, color, 10.58 Min. (Loop) 

The videoperformance „Polish“ deals with our desire for optimization and perfectioning. Appearances are deceiving and rather poisonous polish than real improvement or value. The expectation of a god-like human-being is a conceited deception and its polish will spall at some time. Our desperate urge to improve things is quite often destroying their actual quality.

The apple is not only symbol of seduction but also symbol of our lost innocence in many ways.

Single-Channel HD-Video, sound, color, 14.15 Min. (Loop)

People have always been inclined to ask oracles for possible answers to haunting and essential questions. Probably everyone has at least once tried to playfully find out if the person they were in love with would feel the same. „Maßliebchen“ is the outdated term for daisies or marguerites resp. flowers that are usually used to play „He loves me, he loves me not“. It´s often a deeply meaningful question whose answer is quite random through that game. I see some similarities to art and my question of being an artist or not being an artist there, too. So I decided to find out by the flower-oracle. But not without making it also more physically torturing than the usual game by adding stingle nettles to it.

The answer to the question definitely requires patience. What starts easy becomes more and more serious and you have to take the decision if you go on facing the negative aspects or if you decide on the easy game.

Read more on the vimeo page

Single-Channel HD-Video, color, no sound, 7.40 Min. (Loop)

Bread is regarded as an if not the essential food for human beings. Not only has it a long tradition but also a lot of symbolic meaning. From stories of the Holy Bible where Jesus is breaking the bread or even regarded as the bread himself to fairy-tales like Hansel and Gretel where the crumbs are a means to not get lost resp. find the way back to their safe home the food seems to play an important role in our life. It even seems to be a synonym for food in general: So we also speak of „our daily bread“ in terms of means of subsistence.

Though we all know the saying „You are what you eat“ we´ve become accustomed to eat a lot of things where we don´t actually know what they are resp. what they consist of or contain. Sometimes it seems like we´ve accepted that the food industry is in power concerning our daily bread.

„Crumble“ is an somehow absurd comment on our relationship with and behaviour towards the things we eat. They might be suprising and we won´t like the taste but just go on devouring it. Sometimes at least.

Loop (2.48 Min), Single-Channel 4:3 Video, b&w, sound

The videoperformance “Angel Wings” is a metaphor for our eternal longing for ultimate freedom, for the desire to fly away like a bird. The try to sew feathers on my skin to resemble a bird and become an aerial creature is foredoomed to fail. Fatal pathos. A modern Icarus. Meditation of physical and emotional pain. The sound is based on a German children´s song whose actual lyrics and sound got altered a bit and adapted to the video´s message. The easy melody is contrasting the rough picture. In its endless repetition the sound gets a mantra-like quality and the picture and endless torture that is nevertheless poetic.

Angel Wings has a.o. been shown at “The Eye of the Collector”, selected works of the Manuel De Santaren Collection, Villa delle Rose (MAMbo), Bologna (with Maria Josè Arjona, Niklas Goldbach, Jesse Aron Green, William Lamson, McCallum and Tarry, Hans Op de Beeck, Luigi Presicce, Isabel Rocamora, Janaina Tschäpe) 2012.

Single-Channel HD-Video, color, sound, 8.45 Min. (Loop)

We can´t get rid of our past. No matter how often we wash the dirt off our shoes. We can´t wash the path off. Our past is present. The journey is flow. The journey is struggle. The journey is tranquility. The journey is tremor. The journey is everything. The journey is us. We are the journey.

Single Channel HD Video, color, sound, 3.15 Min. (Loop)

The World is a video-loop humorously reflecting on the dichotomy of man & nature as well as dealing with the restrictions of the nature of human beings that man wants to overcome while knowing that in some way we´re puppets on a string regarding physical restraints. A landscape of trees is the stage and backdrop for this drama of lights and darks that is only revealed in its body of fun.

Can´t Escape (A) 90 x 140 cm / 5 + 2 AP
Can´t Escape (B) 50 x 75 cm  / 5 + 2 AP

Video not online yet

Landscape has a long tradition in art history but is also an abundantely photographed motif in the world of (amateur) photographers and finally contributes to the digital landscape when uploaded to the world wide web where people want to show their trophies. Therefore nature is often rather perceived „second hand“ or through the viewfinder instead of directly experienced.

Can´t Escape is discussing the desire for nature which is the core of people´s attempt to catch nature or landscape as well as the excessive visual overload that is created this way.

For my project I was interested in giving the digital images fed into the www a physical body again and transplanting them into a real landscape. So I made a suit out of photographs I found while browsing for pictures tagged with „mountains“, „Berge“ etc. resp. a similar landscape which is chosen as the backdrop-environment for my own photograph. In this scenery the person inside the suit tries to blend in with its surrounding landscape, tries to reunite with nature, tries to merge copy and original landscape but has to fail. The work is also about the relationship of viewer outside the picture and the person in the picture as well as the picture itself.

It´s dealing with different states and layers of a picture, transformation and the role of man in relation to it. The depicted person is covered in pictures and its view will always be influenced by what it has seen before so that there is no real original or virgin pic anymore.

Photoseries

„Untitled“ is a photo series of currently 5 pictures that is discussing human relationships and habits through confusing constellations. It´s not clear what´s going on or how people are related with each other. There´s an air of intimacy on the one hand and confusing emotions and gestures on the other hand.

A mystery remains, open for interpretation and speculation while the pictures may also call re-enactments of media-images or images within art history into one´s mind if familiar with that art practice. What it is about though resp. the true origin of the images remains a secret of the artist if not told by the artist herself.

The performative act in "Glacier Party" is a kind of initiation-ritual which results in an ambigous painting (created by the dripping, colorful candles) that is transformed again through another medium (photography) and that triggers associations with diverse topics and pictures that are already part of our collective memory of images – from religious topics to certain sexual practices. It´s a celebration that involves the artist as immediate material, too, in which his body becomes another layer, another surface in addition to the actual canvas. 

The resulting photos are the last stadium of transformation and are proof of the action that took place, are silent yet telling witness to something intimate that is telling us about exposing yourself to change beyond control and dreams about unification. „Glacier Party“ is interested in the artist, the process of creation and the power of transformation.

It´s a performance project in collaboration with NY based painter Jacob Perkins. His desire for creating a painting and a video at the same time was the base of our further artistic investigation. As this dealing with and merging of medium also shows an aspect of transformation it was important that there would be a visible transformation in the picture to stress the time-based-media performance and video.

We created a setting in which the painter will be in the painting and plays an important role in doing so without actually taking action. The actual painting will be created by itself, being triggered by another artist which is me. Also the painter in the painting will be transformed himself through and during the process of creation. The very first setting is an installation of its own, however, that will also be transformed and in some way die whereas this death of the installation is the crucial condition for the life of the painting afterall. The artist, however, is in between. He is the connecting figure exposing himself to a dangerous situation that can´t be controlled.

It´s creating a kind of initiation ceremony where the artist merges with the canvas, connected through the melted wax which functions as a kind of paint. And even when the artist is gone, the artwork will stay and you can see slight traces of him left that are witness to an event.

Like an exercise or an instruction the video has two "chapters":

I see
II touch

The focus of the video resp. the actual story is taking place within a circle/ round shape that could be a mirror but also resembles a peep-hole through which the viewer observes something that is maybe private, intimate, not meant for him.