Artist
Originally, my show was supposed to be about language as object and non-standard ways of circulating language, thus creating a new epistemological field, supporting our experience of communication, dialogue and correspondence. Court language or Hofsprache, seemed like a perfect match for this since it’s a very old technology in language, that has kept its implications and identity throughout its whole existence. When we engage ourselves in court discourse, we are aware of what the implications are of utterances as such as well as statements.
Nevertheless, I, as you see, abandoned this idea and decided to organize an exhibition around identity and biography. Hofsprache and court language still plays a role here, as that specific function in language ascribes us a precise and enclosed identity. In court we are responsibility for our actions and words with our body. We support what we say with our body.
Does this resemble how we respond to an image? Do we share the same attachment to an image of ourselves, as we do to the voice and utterance of ourselves?
I’m interested in how the portrait, the image, and the idol creates identity. And how we mirror that visual identity, and further on how we internalize that image and use it as an internal production of the self.
These pictures were shot in the latter part of 2020 in Berlin, why it is even more special to me, having them exhibited here for the very first time.
Together with Anna Petrova, I’ll be performing a script on the opening day named Resort. It was written summer 2021. One can hear a recorded version of it, solely performed by me, on a tape recorder in the gallery. Remember to change to tape B when tape A runs out. The script deals with identity and memory, how the slightest movement in our conception of ourselves, as for example in an incident of a disease, can dissolve the identity with which we face others and our environment, as well as our internal conception of the self.
Thanks a lot to Igor Zaidel for making this exhibition possible. Thanks to my friends in Paris for sharing ideas and thoughts.
Impression
