In meinen fotografisch-dokumentarischen Arbeiten (1992–2020) habe ich mich eingehend mit zahlreichen Krisenregionen in Asien, Afrika und Europa befasst. Dabei habe ich in den vergangenen Jahren einen geographischen Bogen vom Indischen Subkontinent über die Region Pakistan und Afghanistan bis hin zum Balkan betont. Ein Großteil dieser Arbeiten – on isolation: fragmented peripheries – zielt darauf ab, die historischen wie gegenwärtigen Zusammenhänge von Gewaltereignissen, Raumordnungen und Migrationsphänomenen fotografisch und im Medium der künstlerischen Collage sichtbar zu machen. Den entstehenden Objekten kommt dabei zugute, dass ich mich über die Jahre hinweg wiederholt in den entsprechenden Regionen aufgehalten habe und mit mehreren Bildschichten arbeiten kann
Graham Greene – Ein ausgebrannter Fall
„
…
“Sagen Sie ihm, daß es mehr gibt als die Wahrheit“, sagte Parkinson. „Das ist eine Seite der Geschichte der Neuzeit. Glauben Sie wirklich, daß Caesar gesagt hat: Et tu, Brute? Das hätte er rufen sollen, und jemand, der zufällig dabei war – der alte Herodot, nein, das war der Grieche, nicht wahr, es muß ein anderer gewesen sein, vielleicht Sutton, hat gemerkt, was nötig war. Die Wahrheit wird immer vergessen. Pitt hat auf dem Sterbebett Schinkenpasteten von Bellamy verlangt, aber die Geschichte hat das geändert
“
…
„
Ein ausgebrannter Fall
Fjodor Dostojewski – Schuld und Sühne
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Ich liebe es sogar, wenn man so vor lauter Eifer lügt. So ein Lügen ist das einzige menschliches Privilegium vor allen anderen Lebewesen. Wenn du so lügst, wirst du dich schon zur Wahrheit durchkrabbeln. Ich bin ja darum Mensch, weil ich lüge, das heißt fantasiere. Keine einzige Wahrheit ist erreicht worden ohne das man vorher vierzigmal oder auch vielleicht hundertvierzigmal gelogen hat. Und das ist in seiner Art höchst ehrenvoll. Wir aber verstehen nicht einmal aus eigener Fantasie zu lügen. Lüge mir vor soviel du willst, aber lüge in deiner Weise
…
„
Schuld und Sühne
bookshelf in the making – april 30th
april 28th
Die Kunst des Zeichnens – Comic, Manga, Fantasy – april 27th
Die Geschichte der Francine R. – Widerstand und Deportation – April 1944 | Juli 1945 – april 25th
tulip, bread, wild garlic – april 24th
april 23rd
april 22nd
more …
Thilo´s funeral – Hannover; march 26th
„
… the square top of Kilimanjaro is wide as all the world; it is incredibly white as it
shines dazzlingly in the sunlight – and suddenly he knows that is where he is bound.
„
Ernest Hemingway
open.closed – submission for Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021|2022
„
such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world
„
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
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Check-points disrupt the „river of life“. They claim an often fragile sovereignty over space, people, and goods, while, at the same time, individual freedom comes to a halt. They are the nucleus of discrimination, corruption, subtle as well as gross violence. In conflict regions they document and permanently reproduce the instability of borders and frontiers, legal arrangements, and political power.
In particular, Central Asia was thought to become a heaven of progress and peace by ending British colonial rule in the 1940s. The year 2022 will mark the 75th anniversary of India‘s independence, its partition from what then has become Pakistan and East Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and relating border conflicts as well as numerous hot and cold civil and state wars with adjacent regions or countries. Instead of realizing the shaky vision of a „river of life“ the whole region is filled with unresolved claims, floating nationalism, administrative instabilities, and patchworks of ethnic, religious, and political conflicts.
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Constitutive for my work is a continuous interplay between photography‘s objectifying potential and its personal conversion into visual palimpsests that represent our inability to finally grasp the physical and structural, the visible and invisible violence I have been confronted with. For me, the open-shut-down-moment of the camera is a liminal stimulus to engage with the intrinsic limitations of photography as a documentary genre in order to disclose myriad ways to perceive realities.
…
„
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The busy surfaces of Torma’s large cotton, linen, and silk textiles can take years to complete. Nonetheless, their rainbow colors and rich textures vibrate with a sense of spontaneity, as if they capture a fleeting moment from a dream. As in dreams, Torma’s textiles bring together a disturbing mix of images and sensations. A male figure’s inflated erection and a set of disembodied, gnashing teeth are just two of the many small but potent cues throughout Torma’s work that confound an easy reading of what’s happening, blurring the line between good and bad. Whether they attract or repel us, Torma’s fanciful, wild things express the breath of their creator’s imagination: the figures “come very easily from my fantasy,” she declared.
…
“
Hyperallergic
bookproject – first draft with blindmaterial
former publications after Hannah Höch
dialogue Mendes|Dinić
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My interpreter had six children. From newborns to grown-ups, like a staircase. It was still possible when we arrived to the village to see where Dostum’s had crushed the children’s skulls. A stain… It looked like the victims had been grabbed by their ankles, or so I guessed, because one could still see purpled marks of hands printed on the babies’ legs. The heads… Just like that. Young skulls are soft. I entered one of the houses and there was the body of a girl. I couldn’t exactly understand what happened with her since her dress was folded back, covering her head. I mean, the place of her head. My interpreter cried out, desperate. He cried and cried and cried. I walked outside and raised my hands high:
how? How?…
…
“
How is the key question in art. In the search for form, the artist must ask the question of how? How is the natural predecessor of form. The form is as such cold. Form is an experiment. To augment form with content is a further level in artistic creation. To have found a universal language is already a culture.
An example: children are not a form, they are a part of the story. In them is to be found the culmination of people, place, events, both happy or sad, dependent on whether these events themselves are happy of sad. Children can viewed as being of a tapestry of content.
Heads and skulls are forms. In them, nature tries to answer the question of how, without articulating the question aloud. In a similar way, a dress is a form, an organ pipe, the number 6 or a scream, a scream, a scream.
The forms holds the content together like purpose-built mould. The artist is a carpenter and collector. All stories are collected, rub against one another, are assessed – the art learns from itself about itself. The art is smarter than all of those who created the mould. If the mould breaks, then our story breaks too. Culture – nowhere.
FAZ facsimile – essay Habbo Knoch
dialogue Mendes|Dinić
„
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the rebels made him look for and find his father, after which they put the infant on top of his corpse and declared the boy ‘Prince of the Dead’.
…
“
In the year that the boy named Morie ascended the throne and become the Prince of the Dead I was 14 years old.
Some years previously, the ground shook. Bombs fell on my hometown. I did not understand what was happening and the grown ups just grimaced – that was a sign of the times. The child looked at the world in its normal way. We and they were not concepts but words. And until someone consented to explain the words to us, we we could not speak with our neighbours, our dealers in death. At 14 years of age, we had just moved west, I knew all of the words by heart. But nobody was there to warn me about them. Words are in fact contaminated bodies, capable to making the ground shake and able to murder my neighbour. Words cause people to be shot at.
Morie, the boy on the cruel throne, who was previously his father, knew, or, at least today I imagine it to have been so, today, as I try to use words to shut words up, Morie understood the capacity of words, even before he found someone to explain them to him. Early enough, he got to know the people, the horror with which he weighed his words: „Prince of the Dead“. Just one more installment in the lineage of the killers of our parents with them their history, their faces and their culture.
Or do our parents not have the faces of their butchers?
concept and visual artwork: Wolf Böwig
text: Marko Dinić, Pedro Rosa Mendes, Habbo Knoch
layout: Christoph Ermisch
screenprint in diary – february 28th
february 25th
first tests screenprinting – february 23rd
„making of“ für HNP – february 22nd
february 20th
february 19th
more …
