Reflection on my works 2016-2026
My work explores how memory, history, and images change over time. I am interested in how events are experienced in the moment and how they are later remembered, often differently, shaped by distance, context, and personal perspective.
Projects such as Forgotten Doctrine, When The Power Has Gone, We Are All In It Together, and On Becoming An Immigrant look at how recent history fades, shifts, or becomes simplified. They focus on the gap between lived experience and later interpretation.
Much of this work draws on materials connected to the former GDR, as well as more recent events such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. I used archival objects—documents, photographs, and teaching materials—not as fixed records, but as things that could be altered. By folding, layering, or re-photographing them, their meaning became less stable. The focus moved from what they showed to how they functioned within systems of control and memory. This led to an ongoing question: how do systems leave traces in images, objects, and memory?
In my newer work, including Until It Ends and While It Floats, this question continues, but the method has shifted. Instead of altering materials directly, I work with a single photographic image and place it into different environments. The image stays the same, but its appearance changes depending on light, water, movement, and viewpoint. It may fragment, dissolve, or remain only partly visible. Here, I set up the conditions, but I do not fully control the outcome. The image is shaped by what acts on it.
Although the earlier and newer works appear different, they share the same structure: something is placed into a system, the system acts on it, and what remains is a trace. In the earlier work, these systems are political and historical; in the newer work, they are physical and environmental.
What has shifted is my approach. I moved from actively altering material to allowing change to occur through external conditions—shifting from controlling transformation to observing it. Across all of my work, images are not fixed; they are shaped by what acts upon them, and what remains is never stable.
Projects such as Forgotten Doctrine, When The Power Has Gone, We Are All In It Together, and On Becoming An Immigrant look at how recent history fades, shifts, or becomes simplified. They focus on the gap between lived experience and later interpretation.
Much of this work draws on materials connected to the former GDR, as well as more recent events such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. I used archival objects—documents, photographs, and teaching materials—not as fixed records, but as things that could be altered. By folding, layering, or re-photographing them, their meaning became less stable. The focus moved from what they showed to how they functioned within systems of control and memory. This led to an ongoing question: how do systems leave traces in images, objects, and memory?
In my newer work, including Until It Ends and While It Floats, this question continues, but the method has shifted. Instead of altering materials directly, I work with a single photographic image and place it into different environments. The image stays the same, but its appearance changes depending on light, water, movement, and viewpoint. It may fragment, dissolve, or remain only partly visible. Here, I set up the conditions, but I do not fully control the outcome. The image is shaped by what acts on it.
Although the earlier and newer works appear different, they share the same structure: something is placed into a system, the system acts on it, and what remains is a trace. In the earlier work, these systems are political and historical; in the newer work, they are physical and environmental.
What has shifted is my approach. I moved from actively altering material to allowing change to occur through external conditions—shifting from controlling transformation to observing it. Across all of my work, images are not fixed; they are shaped by what acts upon them, and what remains is never stable.