collages

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

In return, I discovered my artistic self. My first diary-like collages were created during this multi-month journey.

To this day, Black history is barely perceived as part of German history. Against this background, I developed my series “THE STRANGER” in 2021. With these 14 sequential collages, I playfully and conceptually question the purely Western gaze and show how one-sided traditional art history is. Through targeted visual interventions, I break open historical lines of sight and expose mechanisms of racialization – a phenomenon that postcolonial research mostly describes only theoretically.

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

Biologically, a subdivision of Homo sapiens into races cannot be justified; there is no scientific basis for distinguishing between “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 reproduction 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 deep emotional injury is referred to as psychological or mental trauma. While medicine uses the term to designate physical wounds, art proves to be a source of strength for me to process trauma of any form and to actively work against the repression of the colonial unconscious. My method follows a consistent principle: I collect fragments of European visual art as well as scientific illustrations – mostly reproductions from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I deliberately deconstruct these seemingly innocent visual worlds, such as alpine idyllic landscapes or bourgeois portraits. By cutting them up and reassembling them, I create visual paradoxes. In this way, a new, different meaning emerges, fed by the contradictions between the original image statement and my intervention. My collages refuse to offer a harmonious gaze and force an active confrontation with historical amnesia.

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

The presentation of the 14 collages in classic insect display cases adds a decisive spatial and conceptual dimension to my work: I am reflecting on the colonial practices of collecting, dissecting, and categorizing. By fixing the deconstructed bodies like scientific specimens behind glass, I link the visual violence of art history directly to the historical control mechanisms of anthropology.

View of the exhibition

In my work, the insect display case transforms from a tool of natural science into a mirror image of a racially influenced, European scientific gaze. The title “THE STRANGER” thus turns into its opposite: with the shift in perspective, the supposedly familiar of the European pictorial tradition is broken open and made visible as a historical construct.

Short film “THE STRANGER” 2020

or the skin protects us from the outside world, but not from racism - that creeps through every pore.

In 2020, the short film “Das Fremde” celebrated its premiere at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF as part of an international virtual reality symposium. The work was created in the course of an Artistic Research Masterclass at the Film University, to which I was invited to explore racism and colonial continuities through film.

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

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 trauma:

– from toy cars and everyday tableware to the grandparents' doorbell sign – collide here abruptly with colonial stereotypes. In this fracture is reflected an experience that an entire generation of Black people in the GDR had to share.

Selection of collages

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If you are interested in these works, I look forward to receiving an email.

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