Man, Ship and a Landscape

3 Photographic Series

Man, Ship and a Landscape consists of three different series that I started at the very beginning of my experimental photography in 1997 with Landscape with Human Figure 1-4. This was followed by White 1-2 (1998/2012) as well as photographs generated from the video Man, Ship and a Landscape from 2013. The works are part of my visual research into the monochrome picture, some kind of Suprematist approach within still and moving image.

Untitled (Apollo Moonlanding & Hall of Presidents)

Photographic Series, 2015

These monochromatic photographs I made from old found slides with the help of a nanotronic-microscope in the science laboratory of Pioneer Works in New York, where I was artist in residence. The enlargements show some details of common places of American cultural history such as landing on the moon or showing wax figures of all American presidents as a historical spectacle within Disney Theme Park in Florida. I was interested in the materiality and the multilayered visual structure of the image itself with and beyond the graphic scratches and damages of the slide surface. Like photographic palimpsests of some rewritten fragmented history.

Night Cities Series

Photographic Series, 2012-2015

The series of photographs I made in several cities at night, most of them in Berlin and New York. I tried to ketch up the moment when the banality of everyday life turns into reduced abstraction and beauty. It is some kind of "inner photography" reflecting my interest in urban psychograms, heterotopias and no-places. It reflects also my interest in the themes of dislocation, migration, nomadism and the construction of identity within a state of “in-betweeness”.  

The last four photographs are from the series “Without Title (Berlin Teufelsberg)” I made on location of the former US (NSA) listening station on the top of the artificial hill, heaped up from parts of the rubble of Berlin from WWII. It is a part of my ongoing visual research project “Geography of Memory”.

Shadowing the Black Square: Moscow Fragments

Photographic Series, 2004

This photographic series was inspired by Malevich’s “Black Square” which I saw in Tretyakov Gallery during my residency at Moscow House of Photography. Here and in related video works my gaze focuses on the psyche of the post-communist society following its experience of the failure of a utopia. The state of personal and political “in-betweeness” relates with the phenomena of collective memory but also omnipresent surveillance.

ARTIST`S STATEMENT

Between Malevich and the Revolution _ displaced reality _ searching for the black square _ irony of history _ finding a nostalgically utopian picture of a protest _ fluid interspaces _ seizing counterpoints with camera _ beautiful/spiritual _ absurd/ bizarre _ looking for an inside perspective _ postcommunist subjects walking around _ acceleration _ claustrophobia _ Lenin is hugging me _ experience means art _ an archetypal amalgam of the familiar and the unlived _ conquering space _ happiness _ amazement as a permanent state _ reality is staged.