“Home and Hearth”
Featuring stylish furnishings, order and cleanliness, the subject of the picture from the 1970s corresponds
to the customary notion of a bourgeois world, and fulfills all the criteria of our European civilization characteristics. The bedroom – intimate place of marital desires – transforms into a crime scene under the gaze of the viewer. On the photograph, where flowers once stood, a scene of indignation is now reflected. The catoptric view dissects the lifeless body. The mirror reflects our fantasies and curiosity. Supplemented by the collection of wood samples before it that are marked by various traces of wear and tear, the installation labeled “Home and Hearth” is at once a visual memory and a vision.
“For some, I say, mirrors were a hieroglyph of truth, because they are able to reveal what appears before them, just as it is customary for truth not to remain hidden.” (Raphael Mirami, 1582)
“Darry”
Using “Darry” as an example, - a small place in Schleswig-Holstein, where a 31–year-old mother murdered her five sons in 2007 – the erroneous conclusion is pointed out that even an idyllic place, where the viewer would never suspect bad things to happen, may turn into the scene of a crime.
Anything can happen anywhere. We are not absolutely safe anywhere.
In his “Poetics of Space”, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard equates the motif of the house with the mother, since her uterus is the first home of yet unborn life. Trustingly, children subject themselves to the protection of the mother. Unexpectedly, the protective space turns against what it protects, destroying it. Exemplifying this are everyday objects such as the stove, shelves and a neon lamp with a protective covering of sanded roofing cardboard – a material that normally forms the “roof over our head”.
This change causes the ensemble of the objects to become unusable, protecting them from our access.
“Table-Chair-Closet-No Bed”
The representation of things the way they have existed for decades goes back to our childhood and continues up to the present. The objects feed the memories of experienced time – the traces of use,
often damaged parts and defects, attest to life and bring to mind what we have experienced. The invisible becomes visible through our perception of the objects and present again via the decoding of our individual experiences. The reference for the installation “Table – Chair – Closet – No Bed” is the emptying of the apartment of a person who has died, the apartment having been furnished with the bourgeois furniture of the 1950s that has now been removed from its customary environment. Only when the pieces of furniture come together again to form something that makes sense can a person take possession of them once more,
use them again. Up to this point, each individual object withdraws from its designated purpose under the protective tar-cardboard netting. The notion of “No Longer” and of “Not Yet” cancels out the practical value
of the objects, and prevents their way back into the cycle of goods – the furniture pieces remain in their self-referential existence.