2. Forgotten Doctrine, since 2024
Forgotten Doctrine ( 2025)
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12469851-forgotten-doctrine
Forgotten Doctrine began with remnants of my life in the GDR and has developed through a process of returning to existing photographs, objects and texts and transforming them without destroying them.
The material comes from my personal archive and from objects connected to the education and everyday life of the GDR. Black-and-white negatives, student portraits, badges, medals, books, slides, handwritten texts and other fragments are removed from their original contexts and subjected to different physical processes. I encase, layer, cover, embed, cut, roll and compress them. Sometimes I photograph the transformed objects; sometimes the objects themselves become part of the work.
The original material remains present throughout these processes. A negative becomes enclosed in resin. A photograph is layered until individual portraits merge. A badge or medal is embedded in ash or clay. Pages from books are covered with white paint. A text is cut and rolled into a rifle casing. The object may become partially hidden, distorted or inaccessible, but it is not discarded.
This tension between preservation and transformation is central to the work. I am interested in how far an existing object or image can be changed while retaining its presence. What remains visible, what becomes concealed, and what survives only as a trace are determined by the material process itself.
The historical circumstances of these objects remain part of the work. They come from a particular time and place and carry memories of education, authority, belief and everyday life in the GDR. But the work is not intended to illustrate that history or provide a fixed interpretation of it. My interest has shifted towards what happens to these materials as they are carried across time and encountered again.
Each work becomes a different experiment in changing the condition of something that already exists. Through these transformations, Forgotten Doctrine moves between document and object, visibility and concealment, preservation and change.
The question running through the work is simple: how can something be transformed without being lost?
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12469851-forgotten-doctrine
Forgotten Doctrine began with remnants of my life in the GDR and has developed through a process of returning to existing photographs, objects and texts and transforming them without destroying them.
The material comes from my personal archive and from objects connected to the education and everyday life of the GDR. Black-and-white negatives, student portraits, badges, medals, books, slides, handwritten texts and other fragments are removed from their original contexts and subjected to different physical processes. I encase, layer, cover, embed, cut, roll and compress them. Sometimes I photograph the transformed objects; sometimes the objects themselves become part of the work.
The original material remains present throughout these processes. A negative becomes enclosed in resin. A photograph is layered until individual portraits merge. A badge or medal is embedded in ash or clay. Pages from books are covered with white paint. A text is cut and rolled into a rifle casing. The object may become partially hidden, distorted or inaccessible, but it is not discarded.
This tension between preservation and transformation is central to the work. I am interested in how far an existing object or image can be changed while retaining its presence. What remains visible, what becomes concealed, and what survives only as a trace are determined by the material process itself.
The historical circumstances of these objects remain part of the work. They come from a particular time and place and carry memories of education, authority, belief and everyday life in the GDR. But the work is not intended to illustrate that history or provide a fixed interpretation of it. My interest has shifted towards what happens to these materials as they are carried across time and encountered again.
Each work becomes a different experiment in changing the condition of something that already exists. Through these transformations, Forgotten Doctrine moves between document and object, visibility and concealment, preservation and change.
The question running through the work is simple: how can something be transformed without being lost?