Lost Souls or Für die Beflügelung der Menschen durch Kunst, Installation/Happening, prints on canvas, ceramic objects, 2024/2025.

Exhibited at the Dokumentations- & Gedenkstätte Rostock.

Happening "Selling Souls" (21.03.2025)

 The culture of material and material cultures have been the focus of his work at least since his graphic Polaroid series. In his biographical search for and comparison of points of contact with Web 2.0, in which materiality has been significantly transformed, the artist finds ways of expressing mediality that can ultimately be charged with political criticism. Conceptual works of various formats are assembled from observations of open-ended and unresolved discourses and glitches in a post-structural and post-digital society.

 The installation on display shows a wide variety of canvases, all of which were purchased in furniture stores. These are exhibited in a meaning-ladden cell in the documentation and memorial site of the former Stasi detention center in Rostock. “Leinwandbild – Küche/Kräuter” stands next to "Öl Gemälde". This provokes a conflict of perceptions. The cell is ascribed a generally appreciative, positive personality, but symbolically locks away the form that the designers and producers desperately fought against in GDR times. In the GDR era, kitsch harbored the political dangers of a loss of identity, capitalist and neoliberal seduction and ultimately a lack of quality in design and craftsmanship. The historical development shows a rapid change of direction, which remains true to its motto “mass instead of class” to this day. The prints themselves, which are auctioned off in the final happening, are intended to live on as memorials in the households of the buyers and crystallize art as a sophisticated, individual cultural asset worthy of protection and appreciation.