BIOGRAPHY

PROJECTS

Context, a complex objet trouvé ?
  
Since 1915 Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, we know that the meaning of an object can change by changing its context.We also know that virtually everything can be art , as long as the artist who presents it says so and convinces the audience to believe in it.
Ready-mades were experiments in provocation, crowbars in tearing down artistic conventions. It is Duchamps achievement that there is art that engages the mind as well as the eye.The transition from an art of esthetics to an art of ideas was one of biggest evolutions in modern art. Since contemporary museums conceive also (extra muros) shows outside "the white cube" and inside the public domain, the whole world can be pregnant of meaning in the eye of the one who's looking for art.
 
In my work, I don't focus on ready-mades or on an internal art discourse. I focus on context of sites.
Meaningful sites can be found around the whole globe. Context is a collection of parameters that determines the significance of a location.These can be of fysical, social, political or historical nature as well as dealing with actuality. Besides these objective facts also subjective perception plays a role: this stipulates the "what & how" of a project. My work is often considered to be politically engaged. Of course politics play an essential role in history and daily life. However I am not a political artist.
 
The past 15 years I have worked on a large number of projects that came forward out of the specific qualities of a site. Starting with the project "Union" in 1990 in Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, in which I assembled collected garbage from both parts of the formerly seperated city into sculptures, this principle of contextual working evolved.This "readymade" garbage, carefully selected, I used not only to show that objects incorporate a cultural identity, but also to show that the child was thrown out with the bathwater.
 
Media, technics and materials I use are liable to change. Every project has its own content and therefore demands its own form and medium. Since the introduction of the computer the concept of "copy & paste" announced itself. Not only in a technical but also in a methaphorical way this has become part of my work; reality is permanent surrounding us, I consider it a challenge to recombine it in order to intensivy perception.
 
My installations are sometimes very fysical, sometimes immaterial. Camera Silens ( a project with Olaf Arndt) for instance is a 8000 kg heavy installation, that makes the vistor aware of the absence of sound. It's the reconstruction of a special scientific programm at the clinic of the Eppendorf university in Hamburg in the mid seventies. Objective was to investigate effects of long term deprivation on the subject. Some say isolation of political prisoners in former West-Germany was based on this scientific research. Our Camera Silens shows the visitor his own personal nothing. In this room the subject becomes object.
 
Camera Silens existed a long time before we discovered it. For us it was a highly complex multilayered installation, for the scientists it was just a non echoic room. Camera Silens is not our invention, but we confront the audience with borders, of themselves and of the governing power and this we could only do within the free haven of art.
 
Most of my projects have a temporary and incidental character. They are often only shown on the site for which they are conceived.
 
Since my residency in Berlin I also started working in collaboration with other artists. In 1990 I met Olaf Arndt.We were working as fellows at Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart on another project and “discovered” Stammheim, the prison in which the RAF members have been trialed and detained. Investigating this context brought us “Camera Silens”.
 
In Stuttgart I also met Hans-Werner Kroesinger again.As a director he showed a similar way of working and a same focus. He made a theatreplay based on our Camera Silens, called “Stille Abteilung”. After this we met on several occasions, even in South Africa, where hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave us the material for our project “Truth”. After this the theatre-projects “Gladius Dei” on the banker of Hitler’s Haus der Kunst in Munich and “Plan Gelb” on the liberation of Holland by the Canadians in Calgary followed.
 
Other examples of collaborations are “ The Blind Spot” with Kevin Brand, where we marked his birthground in the former District Six in Capetown with graffiti braille dots. District Six was a very lively and multi-ethnic part of town which was totally torn down in 1965 because the apartheid- government didn’t tolerate “interracial mixture”. The gap near the center of town is still a visible deep wound.
 
Most recently I realized the project “Tempelhof”, a video opera in three parts with composer Tom America (see also www.inberlin.nl).“Tempelhof” shows the different faces of this Berlin airport, most well known because it was built by the Nazi’s, but also used by the Americans for the Berlin Airlift during the Russian blockade in 1948.“Tempelhof” is a tribute to Berlin and his inhabitants, told by ordinary stories that in the end are very special.With Tom America, other projects are planned in Vienna, Budapest and Istanbul.
 
For me art (-production) is indeed always somewhere else. It’s about opening up, looking and finding.The world and reality is like a big permanently-changing ready-made. It can become art by just a slight change of perspective.

BIBLIOGRAPHY