How do you describe your own art practice?
In a broad sense, I think what I do evolves around “experience”. My biggest concern is to transmit or communicate something that was experienced. Something is deconstructed and reassembled within the exhibition space. The materials and the empty space between them should have a word to say, the process of working with some kind of material is in some kind of a correlation with the experience, a physical memory, that I want to embody.
What was your first experience with art?
It would probably be looking art books that we had at my childhood home. I was encouraged by my grandmother to draw and copy images from some of the books, I remember cheating and showing my super bad copies of 18th century Dutch equestrian portraits in school as my own scribbles. I can recall this early excitement about copying curious images found around the house.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Museum and gallery visits inspire me a lot. I believe that exhibition making is a team effort, it encourages me when I see a good production and communication. As for most, books, good conversations and meetings with people from different physical or mental continents who have contrary views on things, put ideas into perspective and push it further. A large part of my interests are driven from medium, material itself with its character and tradition, for example 20th century painting tradition or a specific type of clay in Japan I get to use – sometimes material becomes content.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Most of the projects start with a specific proposal or invitation, a curatorial approach and/or specific spacial conditions of a venue to work with – this information will become the start for the process. Privacy, uncluttered space, time but also its limitations, good tools, someone to drink coffee with at breaks, podcasts and music (and sometimes power naps) are important to keep me going for longer hours.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently a guest artist at the Ateliers Höherweg e.V. in Düsseldorf and working on a series of painting-objects for a planned performative installation piece based on the later life and writings of Tove Jansson. The project is being developed in collaboration with Jussi Koitela who is curating an exhibition taking place this summer at Treignac Project in France and is titled “Intra-structures – Monster of the Seven Lakes”. Before the final presentation in Treignac, my painting-installation will be on show here at Höherweg 271 on the last week of March.
Also for this spring me and my collaboration partner, a Danish-Swedish artist and architect Johna Hansen, are invited to show our work and participate in a research-residency at CC. art space in Isfahan, Iran. On this season the curatorial duo of CC.art space focusses on the issue of structural, social on functional failure in architectural space.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
“Surprise” is a term in contemporary art that I am sometimes a little skeptical about. Maybe for me surprises are lately more likely to hit at museums of art history. Not really because of what’s just said, perhaps Christian Kosmas Mayer’s video work at the Leopold Museum in the exhibition “The Poetics of the Material” is what I’d like to mention here. Mayer stages Leopold Museum, the home to one of the largest collections of modern Austrian art, as a memory palace. He uses a 52-part card game as a mnemonic method and individual maps transformed into image representatives placed in dialogue with works of the collection, making a kind of a self-witnessed “preserved history”.
