Artists Statement
I work with the media film, photography, installation and drawing, examining their potential to transport and illustrate memory and time. I am especially interested in how various time structures, which can be found simultaneously or come together in a person or place, can be made visible.
In the video piece "Inventory" my grandmother describes from memory the upstairs of her house and the minutiae of her familiar surroundings, while the camera films the current reality of this space. Due to her physical condition she was no longer able to reach the upper floor of her house. Thus, her memory of the rooms as they were 10 years ago lived on in her. The apparent discrepancy between the voiceover and the images in "Inventory" creates a collision between the remembered or reconstructed present and the actual present seen by the viewers. The no longer visible yet present reality and the current moment call each other and their respective significances into question, thus showing their interdependence.
These layers of time structures, which merge into one another, are also captured in "Installation Schloss Plüschow". Here I made my movements that occurred throughout time in the space visible through a net of threads. Daylight moving through the room also became an actor in the installation: it got caught in the web, making the nearly indiscernible installation appear more clearly. In addition, the fixing of past movements, which took up most of the space, made it increasingly impossible to move around the room in the realm of the present.
My most recent work, the video installation "Metopia", which is the joint project of the artist Miriam Visaczki and myself, concerns family history and the reception of a place of origin. We brought together our individual family histories in a narration, consisting of eight chapters. Our family history is told through the work of Miriam's father, V. V. Visaczki, who since 2001 has documented his everyday life and current politics through a collection of metopes, which are square images with a strict graphic grid. By selecting individual images from the self-contained visual language created by V. V. Visaczki, we tried to locate our origins. Our two families share geographic connections with the part of the Czech Republic that borders Germany, as well as having experienced expulsion and flight.
In "Metopia" our individual family histories bear witness to aspects of a broader history and demonstrate the need to deconstruct the past, which in the personal sphere is adapted to the telling of one's own family history.
In addition, in my work I am interested in directly involving people in the artistic process. I search for forms of communication, which lie beyond existent structures. I have created private and intimate forms of communications between strangers and myself in public spaces of a city, as for example in my work "Please Read".