In my practice, I am interested in the waste, the outcast and what’s hidden in the dark corners of our life world. The occupation with margins and outsiders opens up a new perspective on mainstream culture in the centre and moves at the same time the periphery into the focus of the discourse. This activity is a tradition of European art history, which Nicolas Bourriaud describes as Exform [1, 2]: «… the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste. Exform designates a point of contact, a ‘socket’ or ‘plug’, in the process of exclusion and inclusion—a sign that switches between centre and periphery, floating between dissidence and power.»
My long-term and ongoing research is a starting point for works in various mediums and formats from installation, video, photography up to sculpture. As I see the urgent necessity of an intervention into reality beyond art, I allow myself the liberty to go even a step further and get engaged with a smartphone app, providing bottom-up education and support for the informal e-waste workers in India.
Art experiments, seduces, touches and communicates in all imaginable ways and forms. With its freedom and serendipitous experimentation, it has an important role to play by cracking open the limits of the contemporary.
Having research as a starting point, I am neither interested in communicating facts, morality, nor in purely aesthetic discussions but am looking for an emotional punch that must be found for each piece in its own way. Autonomous art is always a product of its time but must point beyond the contemporary (with its quirks, aesthetics and modes of production) and turn itself toward a field of possibility in the new. Thus art is created in the contemporary and must oppose it defiantly.
1 Verso books: The Exform
2 Leeum 10th Anniversary Lecture – Nicolas Bourriaud: The Exform