NEXT

photo credit: Ben Ross Davis

Artist statement:

Intimate autobiographical storytelling through rebellious performance poetry. I'm passionate about exploring the depths of the soul and creating works of art that will make you think, feel and reflect. Drawing inspiration from my own life experiences and the Status Quo, I strive to create works that speak to the viewer on a personal level. My work is honest and raw. A combination of both autobiographical and imagined stories that explore the complexity of humanity asking questions about sexuality, freedom, identity, social justice and strategies for negotiating life inside capital. A focus on being alive, regaining lust and breaking free from social coercive norms. Each piece is an invitation to understand oneself and the world around us in a new light.  An attempt to use tools for pleasure, for knowledge, for resistance and survival, to forge  intimacy in solidarity with fellow humans. My way to say: I see you, I will fight for you, I will celebrate how you exist.

My work is structured around a number of basic questions. What fuels our aspirations? Alternately, what prevents us as social beings from pursuing our desires? When and why do we fight for something? How do we maintain our dignity? And what are our individual strategies for negotiating life inside capital?

All these are questions that open me up daily for the silence, the lute, the extreme, the vulnerable and the seemingly inconspicuous. In my work I deal with the never-ending individual search for identity, body, personality, ... the loneliness of existence and the attempts to get in touch with other people. I investigate current issues through picking out specific settings – making contact and enter into dialogue with people and the environment. That encounters open up a dialogue under which circumstances and where we are fighting for something. My writings and voice-overs are triggered by an autobiographical impulse to ask questions about our individual strategies to encounter life. In order not to be caught up in a private bias, I find perspectives, pictures and instructions. In addition there are observations, seemingly casual encounters, the contrast between everyday stereotypes and the nocturnal exception. My works often evolve along the lines between documentation and fiction, commentary and staging. I often combine the material with my voice and music in a contrasting montages, which place the seemingly familiar in a new discursive context. My video material is partly documentary and consciously concerned about the neutrality of the view, partly I work with staging and own physical extreme experiences.

Art as a means of expression became existential for me. I think within the arts we can change perspectives, open up a dialogue, unite, find solutions, partners, hope, anger, rage, fear,  the poetry of existence and love. We even sometimes find answers and strangers we did not even know existed. I believe that the love we need and want is never too much, that we are never too much. I believe in communication, honesty, sensibility, losing, finding, lust, vulnerability, strength, community, being scared, ... being open to that never ending search, I guess in short: Humanity.