White Blue Red, 2020
lacquer and paper on wood
225 x 206 x 8 cm
installation view
Untitled (Lenin), 2020
ceramics, concrete, spray paint on bookpage
105 x 105 x 28,5 cm
неваляшка, 2020
video loop
32x18cm
Cape Cross, 2020
graphite on paper
235 x 150 cm
IF, 2020, engaged with different thematic spheres across four rooms of the historic Villa Francke in Potsdam, entering into dialogue with the building's turbulent history. This history is intimately interwoven with German colonialism, Nazi occupation, and later, during the GDR era, with the Soviet military presence.
White Blue Red is based on press images from the August Coup in Moscow in 1991, which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawn from the photo book „The Coup in Russia“ published that year, the blue-red tableau shows a dismantled hammer and sickle composed of enlarged photographic details. This rearrangement of the communist emblem addresses the radical destruction and decades-long reconfiguration of a political system.
Untitled (Lenin): Lenin‘s ideology rests in book form on a pedestal supported by four Lenin busts—they literally bear the weight of the ideology. By inverting the traditional monument structure the work questions who or what is truly being memorialized: the individual or the system of thought they represent.
The large-scale graphite drawing Cape Cross is based on a photograph taken in 1971 by the Namibia-raised photographer Alice Mertens, whose great-grandfather emigrated to the colony of German South West Africa at the beginning of the 20th century.
The depicted landscape shows a site along the Namibian coast where the stone pillar of Cape Cross originally stood. Erected there by the Portuguese in 1448, it is considered one of the earliest markers of colonial presence in Africa. Only a fragment of the pillar remains visible, appearing to hover above the landscape.