My artistic work began on a bus journey across the African continent: More than 20 years ago, I set out there to find my father. I could not find him, as he had already passed away.

Instead, I discovered my artistic self, and I also discovered my artistic parents, who were not a couple in reality: the two masters of montage technique, John Heartfield and Hannah Höch. My first diary-like collages were created during this months-long road trip.

To this day, Black history is barely perceived as part of German history. Against this backdrop, I developed my series "DAS FREMDE" (THE STRANGE) in 2021. With these 14 sequential collages, I playfully and conceptually question the Eurocentrism of classical visual history. Through targeted visual interventions, I break with traditional perspectives and expose mechanisms of racialization – a discourse that, in academia, is usually discussed theoretically in Postcolonial Studies.

#5/14, Mixed Media, 40 x 50 x 4 cm, 2021

Biologically, a division of Homo sapiens into races cannot be justified; there is no scientific basis for distinguishing "human races." Nevertheless, racism is a social reality. While exclusion and group conflicts date back to the earliest human history, this work examines the specifically modern, visually anchored racism of European visual and reproductive history. This history is full of discriminatory references. As art historian Victor Stoichiță aptly writes in "Darker Shades: The Racial Other in Early Modern Art": "Difference exists; otherness is constructed."

In psychology, a psychic or emotional trauma refers to a deep emotional injury. While medicine uses it to describe physical wounds, art proves to be a source of strength for me to process traumas of all forms and actively work against the suppression of the colonial unconscious. My method follows a consistent principle: I collect fragments of European pictorial art and scientific illustrations – mostly reproductions from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I operate with the deliberate deconstruction of these seemingly innocent visual worlds, such as idyllic alpine home scenes or bourgeois portraits. Through the collage-like cutting, masking, and reassembling with the help of paradoxes, I create a new, "different" meaning, which arises from the contradictions between the original image statement and my intervention. My collages deny a harmonious view and force an active engagement with historical amnesia.

#4/14, Mixed Media, 40 x 50 x 4 cm, 2021

The presentation of the 14 collages in classical insect display cases adds a crucial spatial and conceptual dimension to my work: I thus reflect the colonial practices of collecting, dissecting, and categorizing. By fixing the deconstructed bodies behind glass like scientific specimens, I directly link the visual violence of pictorial history with the historical control mechanisms of anthropology.

#13/14, Mixed Media, 40 x 50 x 4 cm, 2021

In my work, the insect display case transforms from a tool of natural science into a mirror image of a racially biased, Eurocentric scientific gaze. The title "DAS FREMDE" (THE STRANGE) is thus reversed: with a change of perspective, the supposedly familiar European visual tradition is disrupted and revealed as a historical construct.

Short film "DAS FREMDE" 2020

In 2020, the short film “Das Fremde” (The Stranger) premiered at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF as part of an international Virtual Reality Symposium. The work was created during an Artistic Research Masterclass at the Film University. I was invited to engage with racism and colonial continuities through film.

2021, the film was screened at the Berlin Independent Film Festival. This was followed in the same year by a screening at Charité Berlin in connection with the event "The Elephant in the Room: Interlinkages between Health, Racism and Colonial Continuities."

To quote the Black poet Amanda Gorman: We've braved the belly of the beast.

This display case is a dense assemblage installation that functions as an analytical archive of a complex identity formation. The artwork engages in visual archaeology amidst transgenerational traumas and the experience of growing up as a Black child in the GDR.

The relics of an East German childhood – such as toy cars, everyday crockery, and a zebra – brutally collide in the glass case with racist everyday objects and colonial caricatures. They reveal systemic racism in a society that often concealed or stigmatized otherness in daily life. This layer is overlaid by the paralyzing speechlessness within the artist's own family, whose persistent silence reaches back to the Nazi era.