Do you see art and culture currently in a crisis? You seem to have so many visions that find their own paths and become autonomous. How do you create that structure—or do you need those entanglements?

I believe in crisis as a technique of governance and regulation. When I hear “art” and “culture,” I always think: what is that supposed to be? Then I think of incredibly flat titles of expensive exhibitions at major institutions, or the subsuming of everything precarious and difficult under keywords like “independent scene” or “arthouse cinema,” which must always be funded. I can find interesting things in both. But the encoding of complicated sounds or visual confrontations in order to make people believe they can present them to me more easily often spoils any curiosity I might have. For me, the crisis of art and culture lies more in the fact that their realities are relegated to marginal spaces rather than being given the political spaces of our lived experience. I want to encounter things that allow me to leave the routines of our living standards again and again.


The foundation of this exhibition was literature. How important is it to you? How does literature influence your work?

Without literature, nothing works for me. I wouldn’t understand much about this world. It isn’t theory, music, film, or even art that truly helps me to access the present. For me there is only the imaginary space of fictional narratives that can do that. When I make works, literature is always present.


What influenced the drawings on the pages of Blue Lard? How did you come to this novel and this work? Is it a coincidence that they emerged now, or are they shaped by the current situation?

It was a conceptual decision to work with overprinted book pages. I had never used a book so directly as the basis for an exhibition. Because it’s so direct, it seemed natural to simply print the images that appear while I’m tuning myself into the exhibition directly onto the book pages. I’m continuing with this because it always produces a bit of luck when Sorokin’s text fragments meet the often found image material. Pragmatically, I also needed to create such a machine for producing luck. Normally I don’t make project sketches, nor do I work with templates. I just have associative material that I move around on tables and floors. With the absence of that tool—because the exhibition will be virtual—I didn’t know how it could work, and through overprinting I was able to bring the novel very directly into the texture of my visual means.


Can literature and text create a space? Is a space also a narrative?

For me there is no difference. I actually always wanted to write. But working narratively in a space worked much better and generated real euphoria and intensity in doing something myself. Perhaps the context of visual art suits me better as a space that can be shaped than the context of the literary field.


The spaces or constellations of yours that I have seen are very ordered and clear, carefully chosen. In THE GLINT OF SELF-DEFEATING PROPHECIES you created a space without a center, without axes, and without traces of function. Yet it was real. What will be similar or different in a virtual space? Is this your first virtual space?

It has long been routine that we understand the current art scene through images of the real in the form of exhibition documentation. So virtuality has long accompanied our exhibitions. That’s what I wanted to clarify with THE GLINT. Although this exhibition exists in reality, it’s impossible to verify the factuality of its reproductions. In that sense the virtual and the real already come together without opposing each other.


Are real and virtual spaces the same for you—or do you approach them differently? Where was the challenge?

Both have their own natural laws and evoke different aesthetics because their development happened at different times and in separate milieus. It was important for me not to create a digital image of my actual work, but I also didn’t want to surrender to the promises of the virtual. I think this exhibition speaks about the real and the virtual and finds its own space, also through the book, the overprints, and the poster. If someone looks at it and says: “Great virtual sculpture!” then I’d rather not be the author of it.


How was the process of creating the virtual space for the exhibition Blue Lard? When does it end?

The invitation to this virtual exhibition by the Caldo team carried a lot of energy that immediately spilled over to me. At first I thought: a 3D exhibition—what is that supposed to be? I only had clichés and kitsch in mind. But somehow I had to engage with this 3D and use it as part of our reality. I quickly arrived at the novel Blue Lardbecause it has so many layers that interact with each other while remaining productively dissonant. The sky-blue process will not end so quickly, even if it withdraws from the public after the exhibition.


Is there a fixed point in the space? Does it expect something from the viewer or give something to them?

In a real exhibition—whether museum or gallery—I usually feel quickly positioned in some way, regardless of how I evaluate the works shown. In virtual space I often sense a slightly tense effort to recreate that feeling of being positioned. I didn’t make any effort in that regard and didn’t worry about the viewer’s sense of security. I let a tree grow in the space that somehow captures the situation. The tree is the fixed point. From the viewer the space expects that they learn to move within it and practice looking. One could compare this to texts of the Beat Generation: we had to understand reading itself as a space of experience and observe ourselves reading—without plot or characters. One constantly dives and swims in directly experienced language.


Why do we have to make mistakes?

Not making mistakes means knowing how something should be. When I sit in front of the control code and stare at it, I feel hypnotized like a mouse in front of a rattlesnake. If I make mistakes there because I don’t understand much of it, then nothing happens at all and I quickly long for my jigsaw. In code everything must have a fundamental correctness. I find that difficult to deal with. In real space, doing something clumsily with craftsmanship can still produce something that I can continue working with very precisely. In interactive 3D it’s very different.

You show a wallet as an everyday object that can be acquired as a 3D print—thus it loses its original function and use. Does that happen when something is cloned or copied? What does the copied object gain or lose? What does it mean now?

I find 3D printing in art incredibly kitschy, dull, and boring. Holding someone else’s wallet in your hand, one that has slipped into their pocket thousands of times, feels very intimate to me—so much can happen there. I’m actually always searching for my wallet. I misplace it constantly, or it falls down and I have to fish it out of the shadow gap at the feet of the gas-station cashier. And I have truly lost it several times. But I’ve always found it again, with or without money—and once it was even mailed back to me although the address in my ID was no longer correct. So far I’ve never managed to develop a particularly smooth relationship with money. Maybe that’s why we have this stubborn relationship. But the 3D print and the idea that others might keep the functionless clone of my wallet somehow reconcile me with the object. What the object gains or loses depends on the imagination of its new owner.


One of your works in the virtual space is the helmet. What does it mean? Does an artist need this protection? Is it for everyone? It is damaged—what does that tell us?

In our present, decisions are made based on probabilities. But things could also be otherwise, since fundamentally the improbable is also possible. Suffering from a very rare illness may be unlikely, but that doesn’t help me much if I have it. I believe there is a major misunderstanding in our systems of power. It is not possible to calculate the future—only afuture, which may not be the most desirable one. The helmet works speak exemplarily about how we qualify our ways of living based on internalized protective measures.

Do you see virtual spaces as competition for real ones? Do they complement each other? Are they the future?

We have become very attached to an either/or logic and quickly speak about complicated mixtures in the present while trying to predict the winners of the future. We want everything to remain nice and orderly even in the future. The simultaneity of many things makes it difficult to accumulate power. I still go to see an Agnes Martin exhibition—despite cinema, photography, the internet, and every kind of breathtaking virtuality. That will continue for a long time.

What would you like to send into the past?

Power relations should somehow be more mixed—that’s something we would have to send clearly back to the past on its way to us. MY “WE” SHOULD BE A DIFFERENT ONE. I would want to convey that the static desire for protection in the West—its desire for order, its technology, its god, and capital as realized fictions—are nothing more than the administrative shamans of its fear of life.

What have you learned in life that has taken you the furthest?

That we are constantly embedded in processes that assign our being to us—but we do not have to acknowledge those assignments. My daughter can enjoy the same thing very much—or reject it energetically. The latter happens with the highest probability when I try to decide what she enjoys, what protects her, or what she likes to eat.

What value do you give to social media within a process (in work, for an exhibition)? Is it still possible without it? Can one already perceive a space there, or is something missing because it is virtual?

Social media does not really like to feed on itself; it prefers the real—real spaces, painting gets liked more easily—and it turns away when the real is not convincing. It gnaws at our sensitivity, but it also trains new ways of looking. I believe social media prolongs processes. On the one hand I can remain quite reserved there, and at the same time constantly renewed functions persuade me to reveal myself, to publish my private space further and further, to allow access to my psychology, and to talk about my identity. Despite all the disadvantages, that can enrich a process. At the beginning of Instagram it could still be an advantage in the struggle for attention if you were very active there, and power relations were indeed shifted. Now everyone is somehow present there, and it has become absolute normality that we extend ourselves and our projects into algorithms written by others. My impression is that existing power relations are now mostly just reproduced there rather than shifted. So social media is present like the weather. Personally I find it interesting to work with it—sometimes more, sometimes less—just as making a poster as a screen print is technically completely obsolete. Social media can add something to the essential thing, but in my opinion it cannot replace it.