DEBUT SEASON Andreas Diefenbach, Ayşen Kaptanoglu, Azzeazy, Gregory Tara Hari, John Hussain Flindt, Minju Kang, Sofia Goscinski

Artist Statement:

One of my focus is how transmission of morals, joys and pain occurs within an individual, throughout generations and groups. I research on fractures in the psyche, and fractures within groups, and how can emerge from it more ease via a fractal understanding of relationships between living beings and their environments.

I want to grow my understanding of dynamics between symbiosis and parasitism, causes and impacts.

So I take a pen and I write what’s in my heart, then I erase it. On top of erased words, I draw lines that carve into my wallpaper,

the curves of the flesh of some metafemmes figures. These curves all together, they form an architecture, they’re giving Body. 

Cell by cell and limb by limb, they climb on top of one another.  What I gotta do now is become an electrician. 

So I connect the switches of my mind, to the power cables that run deep into the folds of these bountiful plastic bodies. 

Now there’s power running.

I sing an old song and it releases oxytocin. Emitting hormones either by touch or by a sound, a long distance phone call: 

My drawings depict simply that, a circuit made of electric tension or communion. 

Tension doesn’t get resolved, so these metafemmes figures end up growing spikes, limbic weapons, to fight an evil that isn’t real.

I am working with what’s invisible but very real. I make sounds, they have a texture. 

To make animations and videos, I take time, I like to show leisure.

I follow the path of my own speculative fiction : we can time travel through a wet and warm hole, our heart valves.

From unlimited futures, to ancestral times, we ride electromagnetic waves.

I am trying to grasp quantum physics, by creating visual metaphor with my people, because we are the most high-tech, that’s how we get in tune with stars and planets. 

Artist Statement:

My work is about a reclamation of possibilities. Possibilities to find a language or an image for a world description away from realism.

"Repeatedly slamming into fixed images or word material. " Meanings are irritated, made to dance and facts dissolved. I question the dualistic juxtaposition of abstraction and figuration, reality and fiction.

It is the field of tension in between, that interests me.

Artist Statement:

At Jean- Claude Maier I will present a series of photographic works that are engaged with memory and cultural experience. Made predominantly by using a small disco laser to directly expose photographic paper, the resulting images are records of the presence and absence of light and objects. The laser produces repeating patterns and bright colours that are presumably chosen by the manufacturer as signifiers of psychedelia, dance and transcendental experience – I am interested in how these visual qualities are conceived, and what happens when they are transformed by the alchemical process of the darkroom.

Artist Statement:

I work in various media, with a focus on sculpture. My interest in sculpture developed through an intense engagement with minimal art during my years of study. Back then, photography and video were my preferred media, but immediately after graduation, my inclination began to shift towards the field of sculpture. Playing with dimensions, between reality and fiction, are fundamental elements in the sculptural process for me.

To me, producing art means being involved in an ongoing process from which things can occasionally be extracted. I find myself bored by art that explains itself at first glance. It can be aesthetically appealing and amusing, or even trigger an emotion, but without a certain enigmatic quality, it doesn't touch me, it doesn't provoke a thought process. In this sense, I strive to surprise myself in my artistic process and ultimately, when contemplating my work, to learn something about myself, about the world.

Artist Statement:

For me, painting does not depend at all on a particular mode of expression or subject matter. From beginning to end, I rely on the process that takes place unconsciously or in the subconscious. Therefore, my painting does not aim to be something other than what it is, such as a symbol or a metaphor. For the pictorial in my paintings is of a highly private nature and is determined solely by my spontaneous everyday inspirations. The images I use are photos that I have taken myself in everyday life or while travelling. The feelings that I have experienced flow into them. And the situation flows into the process of creation. The result is then a strange mixture of the feelings I had while taking the photos, the feelings and the situation while painting. I love that, this mixture of multi-layered feelings and private memories. When I work, my own experience is the most important thing, and this is then reflected in my paintings. I like to go into situations where I am unconsciously exposed to many influences, such as travelling or in a museum. Mainly the emotions I get in everyday life or while travelling are the inspiration for my paintings.

Artist Statement:
In my search for a way to scream out the pain and anger I'm feeling towards the growing violence against women and the politics surrounding it where I come from, at this moment of my artistic journey I explore violence, its origins and the structures that reproduce it. Using memory and self-experience as means of assistance, I am trying to make sense of what doesn’t make sense.

Artist Statement:

I choose to work with issues that directly affect me or make me concerned. The great freedom of being an artist and cultural worker is to adapt oneself to different professions, but then leave them again whenever you want. I have the freedom to decide for myself which color to use, or whether to put underpants on my head as part of my performance costume. At the same time, I truly believe in responsibilities and duties as an artist. Because of the freedom of my profession, I don't have to fulfill anything - no expectations, no standards, I offer no answers. A bit like a harlequin, or a court jester. But instead I'm here to make people aware of things, in a poetic, creative, artistic way - without being any smarter then anyone else or even moralizing others. Besides, I feel that I would make a terrible activist, using flowery expressions and wear small heels at the many demonstrations. Il'd rather be an artist after all.