ARTIST

Berlin (DE)

BIO

Aspect Ratio / Dispositif, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France, 2016; Aurora Borealis, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany, 2017
Faithless Pictures, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway, 2018; Always Contemporary, Ludwig Museum –Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary, 2019; Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA PS1, New York, NY, US, 2019

Image description: Operation Night Watch’ on the Rijksmuseum site, one is instructed Marcel Duchamp’s unrealised idea to iron a Rembrandt has previously been performed by the museum. Following a knife attack in 1975, the lengthy process of restoring the painting is outlined in detail. Archival footage retraces the step-by-step process of the damage being restored.

ABSTRACT

Calculated Chance: Detecting Archives

In my artistic practice I look back as a way to look forward and vice versa. Archives are good places for such mental somersaults.
There are numerous archives an artist can work with: physical and digital, amateur and institutional, real-time and monumentally outdated. They are both responsive places for inquires, and complex labyrinths to get lost in. The ever expanding field of institutional digital art archives maintain the same contradictory character.
It can be seen as an open access platform to appropriate an iconic image, a helpful resource to find an obscure art work, or a dead space of information overload.
The best way to navigate this growing wasteland of plenty is to adopt a role of a detective for whom digitized institutional archives display collections of cultural and industrial heritage like criminal evidence. Detecting cryptic hieroglyphics in a way fragmented remnants of reality are reproduced and displayed one is tempted to surrealistically mimic Alphonse Bertillon’s efforts to calculate chance of identifying what one is looking for.
As an Ariadne’s thread for this journey one might use rigid taxonomic systems, rules of nomenclature, technical terminology developed in botany and zoology or arbitrary regularity of poker cards. A byproduct of such DIY archival practice is a personal meta-archive with systematically registered and chronologically ordered artifacts for simple retrieval. There is, however, an overlooked capacity to automatically facilitate creative intersections behind the ordering mechanism of chronology, which functions as a concrete model of calculated chance.