Das fliegende Künstlerzimmer

OTHER HOOD, 2024 
4-channel video-audio installation
15 mins. 20 secs. 
Parts, 4 TV monitors, 4 speakers 

Other Hood is a continuous project presented in various acts. 

Other Hood ACT I
Other Hood ACT I consists of four audio interviews or conversations that the artist held with mothers of first-generation immigrants in Germany. Each canvas represents an individual story – the voices of the immigrant mothers were generated in English with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). This lends the work an ironic twist. It was also the case that the artist did not want to reduce the identity of the people involved down to their individual accents. 

The space was hung with red fabric to symbolise the inside of the human body. This special fabric is often found in open markets in non-Western parts of the world. 

The stories have a deep personal connection to the artist, who is herself an immigrant mother. The original core theme of “Motherhood” evolved into an exposure of systemic problems, language barriers and historical findings. 

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/916521147

Other Hood ACT II „A Room for Many“
In Other Hood ACT II “A Room for Many”, the voices of the migrant mothers were presented in musical form. Together with the musicians MEGBORNA and Larry Bonćhaka, a unique musical piece was created, which was played through a home-made sound system. 

Within the sound system, a 3D animation ran in an endless loop in a reference to the novel by Virginia Woolf entitled “A Room of One’s Own”. 

Five silhouettes hung from the ceiling and the walls, all featuring superimposed quotes from Bilgin Ayata‘s essay “De-Heimatize Belonging”. The entire room was designed to have five chairs to encourage sitting, contemplating or dancing. 

Other Hood ACT III
Dual exhibition with Paula Niño
Frankfurt newspapers, textiles companies, acrylic pens, wooden chairs, audio 
Lost Weekend Meets Young Art, Munich 

In Other Hood ACT III, the artist made use of the public display cases of the series “Lost Weekend Meets Young Art” in Munich, curated by Jaemin Lee, in a dual exhibition with the artist Paula Niño. 

The display cases presented the same musical piece as Other Hood ACT II and showed quotes from migrants, presented in bright red as headlines in German newspapers. 

Other Hood ACT IV Welcome
Acrylic, newspaper, canvas 
Neuer Kunstverein Gießen

In Other Hood ACT IV in the Neuer Kunstverein Gießen, located in a former kiosk, the artist recreated the original function of the site by selling products featuring quotes from migrants. She also produced a newspaper, in which all the interviews with first-generation immigrants were transcribed in full. 

These newspapers were set out in front of the Kunstverein and given away free to members of the public – like the free newspapers or advertising leaflets that are found on the street. 

NOT HERE, NOT THERE
Avu Gallery 
Prague

NOT HERE, NOT THERE presents post-Soviet and Soviet objects from the artist’s childhood – a Persian rug, a gas lamp, a drinking horn for wine, a meat mincer and a Soviet television – which had been turned into a sound system that played the current protests in Georgia. 

In the background was a photo of the artist’s mother and aunt, taken on a beach in Abkhazia (formerly Georgia). This image was also projected onto the wall and framed in barbed wire – a play on the border between Georgia and Russia. 

THE HOST, 2023
Playground Art Prize 2023 
Construction nets, threads, latex, clockwork, hemp robe, hibiscus tea 
Gallery Von & Von

THE HOST 2023 is a multisensory installation that explores the experience of pregnancy and birth. 

Theoretically inspired by the Greco-Roman belief that the octopus represents the womb, this piece reflects on experiences and takes ideas from collecting, hosting and the general concept of origin. The dominant colour red represents the internal tissues of the body. 

The installation is all about feeling one’s body and experiencing it anew – recalling the innermost being of the body and being aware of what we consume and what consumes us. 

THE HOST plays with the interaction between body, space and origin and encourages us to think about what our bodies carry within them and how we are “hosted” in different spaces. Visitors to the opening were offered hibiscus tea. 

OFFENBACHER EVENING PAPER, 2021
Video-audio installation, sculpture, photography, collage, newspaper 
Joanne Gallery, Frankfurt am Main

OFFENBACHER EVENING PAPER is a name that refers directly to the “Offenbacher Abendblatt”, which was published until 1933 and was printed in the building where the artist herself once lived.

The exhibition reflects on Germany’s power structures in relation to migration and the role played by the housing system. 

When her then landlord began to put up the rent and then, with the help of a lawyer, gradually forced the neighbourhood community out, the artist produced a fictitious magazine called the “Offenbacher Evening Paper”. This carried real-life stories, photos, memories and letters from the lawyer, which were transformed using the “Dada Poetry Generator” app – a method that showcases German bureaucratic language in a new and sometimes playful light. 

The exhibition reconstructed the neighbourhood square, in which the residents gathered together on a bench to drink apple cider and discuss issues – but this time in an empty residential building. Three videos set in suitcases showed dancers and a footballer moving around the empty apartment. 

The central piece, an eagle made from archive issues of the Abendblatt, is the symbol of both Frankfurt and its legislative institutions as well as the city’s football team. The artist is fascinated by this dichotomy and the interplay of words and pictures. 

BREATHING PLANTS, TALKING PLANTS, 2022
Grand Nizza Show (public intervention) 
Construction netting, tapes, bells 
Hotel Nizza, Frankfurt am Main 

BREATHING PLANTS & TALKING PLANTS is an intervention on the facade of the Nizza Hotel in Frankfurt am Main. The work is dedicated to the plants that are grown in the hotel – predominantly subtropical and non-native species. The artist was reflecting on the issue of migration from the point of view of plants.

KOLLEKTIV COMMUNE6x3, 2021 / 2022 / 2023
Public intervention/happening 
Frankfurt am Main, Osthafen Park 

The Kollektiv commune6x3, officially active since 2021, is an interdisciplinary collective that focuses on public interventions and the activation and redefinition of spaces. The first public intervention came about in 2021 in a showroom container in Frankfurt’s Osthafenpark. 

Since then, the Kollektiv has remained active with various installations, lectures, workshops, film programmes and institutional cooperations.

TRUST, 2020
Video installation 
Performers: Ayla Pierrot Arendt, Gabriele Redina Cattani, Nina Nadig, Fanyu Bu 

Video based on Samuel Beckett’s short story “PING”. Four performers embody the space with every movement, gesture and improvisation. 

OPENED FLAGS
OPENED FLAGS (PUBLIC EXERCISES 01) 

OPENED FLAGS is a public art project based on a lyrical poem by Emily Dickinson, whose quote can be clearly read on the piece. What began as research into the symbolism of national flags – their colours, gestures and coded meanings – soon developed into a reflection on nation, protest and public space. 

The first incarnation of the project appeared during the Theatre of the World festival in Frankfurt am Main, in cooperation with Frankfurt Rowing Club, where a choreographed act of resistance was staged, with flags serving as bearers of emotional and political meaning. From there, OPENED FLAGS grew into a series of interventions, which explore how bodies come together, how space becomes history and how visual symbols like flags can convey sorrow, resistance and collective desire. 

Displayed outside Cologne Cathedral (2023), on the Royal Parade Grounds in Kumasi, Ghana, and in the Red Clay Studio (2024), the project includes performance, video and photography – and questions the fixed meanings of national symbols in order to offer a more flexible and open language of hope.