Love & Luxury

2024

Where the grass is greenest, an accumulation of wealth and value, almost anything imaginable forconsumption. Relentlessly driven for exponential growth in the latest updated version of capitalism.Wait. Was there a dresscode?

Imagine reality being exchanged with symbols and signs. Perhaps a simulation? Your surrounding as sophisticated, elegant and luxurious as your favorite calligraphic font. A curated experience of love under surveillance, set against the backdrop of Dubai. Lacking both authenticity and presence of sociopolitical agency for living. Consider a lavish wedding, meticulously planned to exude opulence and perfection. Adorned with chandeliers, fake floral arrangements and the designer gowns projecting an image of success and happiness. Yet, beneath this veneer of luxury lies an eerie sense of hollow artificiality. The couple, caught in societal expectations and the pressure to display affectionand devotion to hegemonic love, while guests, more involved in capturing Instagram-worthy moments than in celebrating a genuine alliance. Contributing to a staged reality, an elaborate performative installation rather than an authentic experience. Emotions merely reduced to transactional and commodified experiences. Stripped of their transformative force which could transcend the materialistic limitations of supposed spaces for mutual growth and emotional fulfillment. Artificial love synonymous with luxury. An illustration of nature is turned into the focal point of the installation. Forced into multifunctionality, fake palm trees anchor the reconstruction of a world, where even the voiceloses its personality. Turning precious wedding vows, promises, for the future into shortsighted, narrativised speech acts, to be fulfilled undersurveillance.

Text by Hasan Zeytin

Continuous Patterns

Collaboration with Hasan Zeytin 2024

The collaborative installation is an invitation for a new interspecies conversation between humans and the environment. It raises the question on the political agency of non-human entities, which deviate from the prevailing norms of value and meaning. Looking at marginalization and queerness in relation to non-human matter can indicate how certain material entities are systematically ignored or excluded based on social constructions of value and power.

The work takes as its departure point the texts „Vibrant Matter“ by Jane Bennett and 'The Companion Species Manifesto' by Donna Haraway who both not only acknowledge, but actively propose new political ecologies towards a paradigm of interspecific ent- anglements and companionships, forming symbiotic relational mosaics.

Subverting the historical appropriation of the visual language of animals’ bodies, the an- thropomorphic characters temporarily adapt different textile reminders of their co-inhabitants. Charged patterns turn into collaged bodies, upholding the denial of assorted external perception. A moment of bodily abstraction and cross-genealogical identification, blurring the distinction of the living forms matter can take. Merged into an assemblage, the mosaic of refusal becomes a visual and theoretical interplay of entities gaining agency from their markings and embracing systemic nonconformity.

Archives of No Memory

2023

The performance comprises a video and sound installation, aiming to examine quotidian, domestic objects, which are transformed into repositories of familial memories.

The work is a multidisciplinary exploration of transgenerational trauma, particularly in the context of descendants of political refugees, emphasizing the significance of objects as vessels of historical narratives and their metamorphosis when transplanted into new environments. The ambivalence between the gaps in knowledge and the attachment through bodily remembrance are translated through the unbearability of the sound produced with the microphone, the constant eye contact with the audience and the deconstruction of the objects shown in the video.

Through the overstimulation of the senses a nuanced portrayal of emotional resonance and collective trauma is evoked, underscoring the complex interplay between material artifacts and embodied memories.

The objects carry memory,
the body carries trauma.