Counting Tears
Every hour since February 2020, an eerily fascinated look at numbers that seem to jump from record to record. Created through proximity. But, closeness does not disappear! And so whole continents merge into a dark mourning mass in their death figures, our globalized world is in the grip of distancing and through invisible deaths newly interwoven in its fate.
Radical Domesticity
The strengthening of right-wing populist organizations and their popularity, among an ever larger stratum of the population, are the starting point of this four-part works calles radical domesticity. Excerpts from the AFD election program can be read in the film "swing right", the work "holy simplicity" and "vote catching" shows the blind belief in an electoral program that predominantly serves the national idea. At "sight protection", the curtain no longer appears Christian, but orientally similar to a burka, simply by changing position. The tassels on the forehead are actually gliders for curtain rods.
Instead of being ready to fight with sword, Germania stands there empty-handed and allows herself to be blindly captured by the election programme of the right-wing populists. Thus the lace
curtain becomes a net in "Rechtsruck" and instead of unity the right wing pulls in its direction. The scenario of this video work is repeated again and again from the front and is accompanied by
an endlessly seeming downward movement.
The white tiles and the cool light remind in their sterility of a battle chamber.
vote-catching, 2019, 1 x 1 x 3 m, Installation view
Conquerista, 2019, Installation, Animation on Screen
This work shows the humorous dialogue with one's own self:
a bold mixture of native self-confidence and the loss of freedom of movement through civilizing achievement.
Structural change
Orderly coincidence
Agglomeration area
Liberation punch
The posting of complaints under #MeToo has been very welcomed. It's time for women to finally talk! But actually it's the classic victim speech. In all the efforts over the centuries to ban women
from speaking, the lawsuit was always allowed.
Because, the old reservations about a victim, the idea that it is complicit, still goes into the trendy concept of resilience - a strong child says no! A self-confident woman knows how to defend
herself!
Remains the question: Does the woman exaggerate? Is she speculating on profit? Was she too cowardly for resistance? Is she lying? all the set pieces add up to the image of a morally deficient
woman that we have known since the Middle Ages.
In my video work the woman frees herself from her braid in order to give up something tried and tested. She takes her old life in her hand with the braid and flagellates herself for attributes
that seem fateful, recorded on a smartphone.
Liberation Punch, 2018. HD-Film on Smartphone, framed, 20 x 29 cm
Me in black. Me in red. Me in gold.
Photography triple leave, 2016, Inkjet on Hahnemühle, je 55 x 70 cm
Text Dr. phil. Susanna Ott
From the eroticism of DIY stores
Silicon on coated hardboard, different sizes. Since 2016
Beyond her control
Above:
The film is formally based on a dervish dance, which is traditionally reserved for men alone, but the ego dissolves in the rotating dance and so there is no longer any female obstacle to
encountering omnipotence. A pulsating, minimalistic sound whips the spinning, caught in the veil of the curtain, the expression of perfect domesticity.
Right:
The plate skirt whirling with ease in the film freezes into a black sculpture.
Tomorrow morning, if God wills. ... (Jihad Girl)
Demo-Video, rotating Object, 20 x 20 x 150 cm, 2015, mixed media
The "Islamic State" urgently needs young women. It recruits them worldwide, including in Germany. Often it is teenagers who exchange their homeland for the desert. There they live in the
caliphate as wives of a supposed martyr and are prophesied a place in the tempting hereafter.
The girls succumb to the secret longing for freedom and adventure, coupled with romantic ideas of a simple life and a transfigured view of a sweet promise: "Paradise".
This work in a dark room shows a "jihad barbie" under a blowing burka of bistro curtains stealing herself secretly from her parents' house. To the muted music of the music box (Brahms lullaby)
the figure circles around itself.
Hüben und Drüben (Over here and over there)
The composed composition of materiality, a curtain as long as the floor in front of a wall of artificial grass, in front of it a kind of doormat which, however, allows one to infer a gravel path. A hedge as a green shelter for conversations about or with the neighbour, a blond hair - someone is at home, but not approachable. Paul Watzlawick took up Heraklit's idea of the "unity in the diversity" of things and pointed out that too much good always turns into evil. The viewer may now ask himself which side he is on.
Out of
As far as here, 2012/2019
Anwesen I – V
(...) We're being watched. Such a German street, in the country or on the outskirts. No one on the way. Where are the people? Is there a curtain moving? That only occurs in novels. The thing is
uncanny enough in itself. Because nothing moves, even if someone observes us from inside: suspicious, tied up or paralyzed, pitiful or thirsting for blood. The curtain hangs, wrinkling like a
wedding train, like a veil, le voile. (...)
In this work, the synthetic lace looks like a chador to protect the woman from covetous glances. At the same time, the use of curtain fabric creates an irritating connection to the cliché of
"German cosiness".
Anwesen I, 2013, HD-Film, Loop
"The windows are open and your appearance is eyed by their curtains." Abdul Squad El-Janaby
schleierhaft
Wildlife Living Room
"Voyeur"-Object, 2011, MDF, Ceramic, Glas, Size 60 x 60 x 80 cm
The curtain is the orchid's death
With this installation, I deal with a phenomenon that is spreading on German windowsills: in the past, they were the symbol of the aesthetes; today, orchids are on the shelves of DIY stores and
supermarkets as cheap take-away items - they have long since displaced the Usambara violet from its window seat.
Framed by curtains, surrounded by nipples, with dust on her fleshy leaves, she thus resembles an aging pop singer whose lipstick is currently running unattractive. That's why I laid the orchid
out to commemorate her, frozen in boundlessness, her portrait framed in silver over it, pale as a shroud.
Winnenden (Serie Schläfer)
In the works of the series Schläfer, created since 2008, I use different German place names as titles. They refer to tragic and dramatic events that took place there. The title of the series
Schlafer, which I chose, reminds on the one hand of terrorists who live inconspicuously integrated while waiting for their deployment as assassins. On the other hand, it also turns out to be a
reference to "inconspicuous" German citizens who can become criminals under certain circumstances.
The Swabian town of Winnenden became sadly famous when in March 2009 a 17-year-old pupil shot pupils and teachers of his school, passers-by and finally himself in a rampage. Lightly and
delicately, the shaped curtain fabric bulges out of the wall like Master Horax's "Hour Flowers" from Michael Ende's book Momo and reminds us of the 15 pistol shots with which Tim K. wanted to pay
attention to his unnoticed life.
More of this serie from left to right: Schläfer, Darry, Biessenbach
Photography works, 2007 - 2014
