Let's start with a fundamental question: What themes do you explore in your work?

In which areas of our society would you say a male-dominated perspective still dominates today?

A clear example is the tech industry. It remains male-dominated. Algorithm-based programs, including AI, which influence our thinking and actions daily, are predominantly programmed by men. However, this isn't just about gender, but also about class. Many of these programmers belong to a privileged elite, having studied at universities like Yale or other expensive, prestigious institutions. Starting from the bottom is more the exception here. The power over the images that shape our digital reality thus lies primarily in the hands of wealthy men.

Do you believe that through the development of open-source programs, we have the opportunity to make the digital image world more diverse and multifaceted?

The problematic aspects often lie beneath the surface and are therefore easily overlooked. We tend to perceive AI systems as neutral because we associate them with cold, sterile processes. In reality, though, they are programmed by humans – humans who too often have a male-dominated view of the world. As a result, we lose many perspectives. And this doesn't just affect gender-specific questions.
A good analogy is the development of the first color films by Kodak in the 1940s. At that time, it was nearly impossible to correctly represent People of Color because the color calibration was done exclusively using white faces. This technology, too, was developed exclusively by white men. Today, we face a comparable challenge.

Let's talk about the formal aspects of your work. You actually come from photography, even though you don't photograph yourself. You use existing images from which you create new figures and environments. However, your working method has only a remote connection to AI.

It's always difficult to explain because many immediately assume that I work with AI as soon as the word "generated" comes up. Then most say: "Ah, so you type something in and the image comes out." But that's not how it works at all. On the contrary. You can imagine it more like this: I have a large pool of data and images, my personal archive. This archive consists partly of photo and video material that my mother and grandmother made and collected during my childhood. From the VHS tapes, I rendered out every single frame as a video still. Additionally, it contains imagery that is anchored in collective memory.

From this image archive, you select photographs that you combine into new images – similar to how AI-based open-source programs do it?

If it's not AI processes that attract you to this way of working, what is it then?

Working with my archive reflects the process of memory as a cognitive achievement. That has always interested me: How does our brain store experiences? How does it transform them into knowledge? How do images work in our subconscious? I see my archive as a kind of building block to explore these questions.

Memories aren't static; we work with them, adapt them to our current situation. They are influenced by external stimuli. When we experience trauma, a kind of feedback loop is created, where a tragic event is played over and over again. Our brain loses the flexibility to work with the memories. I imagine it like information bouncing repeatedly against the walls within a closed room, accelerating and multiplying in this way. Perhaps you already guess that I'm getting at the title of your exhibition Echo Chambers. How do you define the term in the context of your work?

Echo Chamber is a central concept in my practice. First of all, it describes the process of working with an existing archive because the process is based on hermetic closure. Even more important, however, is the content level, where the term plays an essential role. In my work, the depicted family also represents a kind of echo chamber.

This becomes particularly visible in the family portrait Intro Scene I (Family Gathering) from 2023. Here we see a depiction of a seven-member family, over which the Disney logo is superimposed. It's designed as a relief that protrudes three-dimensionally from the picture surface. The monochromatic family members, whose facial features and expressions are very similar, are depicted in a distorted way. They seem to dissolve in the digital image processing. The similarity has something uncanny, almost incestuous about it. This too shows a kind of closure and the absence of external influences.

Even more. The image represents a reality TV context where it's about supposed self-staging, which goes hand in hand with simultaneous self-exploitation and the loss of individuality in favor of self-commercialization. I find this an exciting moment. Because the protagonists of such shows often believe they have their self-presentation under control. In reality, though, it's the directors, producers, and editors who exercise absolute control over the narrative. They're not interested in individual stories, but in applying an already established, functioning, commercially successful recipe. That means the protagonists of these shows are also trapped in a box.

The show motif continues in the form of a casting situation in the installation Worldfamous (Iteration I), which was also part of the exhibition. At the center of the installation is a heavy metal table covered with light gray silicone. A face, also made of the same material, which looks very similar to the faces in the pictures, is modeled from it. Such seating arrangements are familiar from films set in US high schools, colleges, or US prisons. Also part of the installation are five screens showing videos of an obscure casting. The protagonist is recording a so-called self-tape, in which he repeatedly and with increasing intensity shouts the word "Worldfamous." What's this work about?

The situation is, as you already say, a supposed actor recording a casting or audition tape process for a reality TV show. Fame is his end in itself. In the context of this casting, I see myself in the role of the director – so also as a powerful, not necessarily good or trustworthy authority. I have control over this figure. I can control every muscle movement, every gesture, every emotion. The figures I design are my puppets. And more: They are designed in such a way that they basically consist only of a thin layer of image material. This thin layer fakes a body. The body itself is a hollow shell, devoid of flesh and content.

That's true, although I basically "cast" this family from my image archive. At the same time, all figures have many parts of me. But my archive is also based on images that come from a collective, non-familial context, as already mentioned. The father, for example, bears traits of Michael Douglas. The daughter is closely modeled after Kendall Jenner. She's a direct reference to the most successful scripted reality TV show The Kardashians. The sons have the appearance of tech bros mixed with Patrick Bateman. This establishes the connection to the topic of Toxic Masculinity.

The figures might seem somehow smooth, but you sense that something's not right with them. Something has slipped. Maybe it's just their fixed grin that makes them appear fake. But it's also the family structure itself, this conservative presentation of a world that's whole in the conservative sense, which one carries to the outside, like in the Nixon era, so in the 1950s and 1960s. Interestingly, the dramaturgy of reality TV shows is that exactly this image they create at the beginning collapses if you keep watching long enough. The emptiness of the figures is underscored in the videos by the inserted advertising. The protagonists have nothing – no body, no organs, nothing. Their consumption constitutes them. These sourced commercials, which are played between the audition tapes as premature commercial breaks, refer to human aspects: the McDonald's and Knorr advertising stands for eating, digestion, and so on, but also for nutrient-poor instant food and fast food. Quite simply put, this establishes the reference between shell and content.

And how does this relate to the desire for worldwide fame?

The desire for success naturally comes from my personal experience. At the beginning of my career as an artist, I was obsessively ambitious. I absolutely wanted to be the youngest best. In the art world, you're also required to constantly climb ladders. Both dynamics reinforced each other. At this moment came my collaboration with Balenciaga: I was at one of the shows in New York, met Kanye West. He wanted to work with me. I think I drifted a bit at that moment. Fortunately, I got out of there early enough. When art enters a commercial context, it suddenly functions differently. This part of the art world that transitions into the fashion world is extremely superficial – even if the associated success initially promises security. It does this especially when you don't come from an upper class. But this kind of rapid rise is built on sand. As quickly as it comes, it goes just as quickly. And then finding your way back to the "normal" art world is difficult, or almost impossible. But more importantly, I don't want to work in this logic. My work, its content, and what it can achieve should be at the center of interest. Putting the success of a brand first, that felt like working through an American culture and its storytelling back then.

Where does your interest in and engagement with American culture come from?

It was long a dream of mine to emigrate to the USA. I probably got that from my father, who was strongly influenced by films from the 1980s – Terminator, Lethal Weapon, such films that show tough, masculine heroes. The whole American Dream, basically.

The father figure plays the main role in the work Echo Chambers (Performance I). The video work was shown for the first time in the second room of the exhibition of the same name. In it, we see an adult man dancing ecstatically. His upper body is bare, his skin gleams. In one hand he holds a beer can and in the other a cigarette. In the background, we see sections of a gymnasium decorated for a homecoming party or graduation ball. Everything happens in slow motion.

He's right in the middle of this high school movie cliché and fully living it out. For me, the work is about psychological aspects that are inherited transgenerationally – so about wishes or fantasies that my father unconsciously transferred to me. The connection between my father and me also takes place on a production level: The movement sequences are transferred to the figure with the help of an actor, Nick Romeo Reimann.

A very good mutual friend of both of us. Through him, I got to know your work.

Exactly! In any case, I "directed" Nick and described to him exactly how he should move. So in the father are movement sequences that are actually mine and which Nick performed. In principle, I'm directing my father here in a situation that I know only works in his imagination: Life in an American image world that only exists on screen, and where he as an older man no longer has a place. In the work, I fulfill his dream. At the same time, I make him appear absurd because he's out of place. It's too late for him for a high school party. He's too old, and anyway, everyone has already gone home. But he's in this intoxication and can't break free from it. He doesn't perceive the reality around him. He's in an excessive, even manic state that's no longer fun. You could say that he's guided by his ideas, which turn out to be distorted illusions when compared with reality. We as viewers see this clearly.

For me, the absence of the high school kids creates a strong cinematic pull. It's actually just one image, but it tells so incredibly much about this figure. Not just it, but the entire environment is worked out down to the smallest detail.

The video has several cuts, but only two perspectives. Both are consciously kept very cinematic, almost Hollywood-esque. The over-the-shoulder shot is the best example of this.

Above all, the lighting and color choice gives the video a dramatic quality. At the same time, the violet and red bathe the scene in a tender atmosphere. We see the skin, the hair from up close. The director or rather the artist allows us an intimate view. In this way, the father figure gets something vulnerable, without losing the aggressiveness that simultaneously emanates from it. This person also embodies the motif of addiction, which marks a pathological holding onto the intensely lived moment, even though the party is long over.

That could be. That's actually the perfect ending point, right? (laughs)

I think so too. We've already talked for so long and I could keep talking forever. But at this point, I thank you very much for the conversation.