Group Exhibition in UMPRUM, Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, June 2017

The series Hi, How Are You? Deals on the one hand with loneliness and on the other hand with the thought of sensitivity.

My first Inspiration came apparent when I worked eight years with dementia patients at the Red Cross during my studies. In this period, I got close to many people and got to know about their life and past. They could have been my grandparents I never had. I became friends with several of them and was able to be with them while they got depressions because of dementia. In the beginning they simply forgot words, first complicated ones, then more easy ones. The forgetting continued. Soon the ability of building a complete sentence would give them big trouble. At that point, the communication with words already was heavily restricted and the communication especially with gestures arose.

While dementia continues, even the depression fades away and the people fall into a stadium of different times and places between their past and now. A rational communication with words became more difficult, but simultaneous easier when I was gentle and careful with them. When I was attentive, I was able to enjoy these usually short episodes of strung together life stories. For me everything was timeless even though the stories have been strict periods in an illogical and non-proportional relationship. They seemed like a journey through time and places. 

In my pictures I am trying to find the places between rational communication, madness and peace. The floating plastic hand glows help me talking to the viewer and arouse a feeling of weirdness and sensibility towards differences in communication. The fact that they can be seen from different perspectives during different constellations underlines the problematic and the beauty of language in general at the same time.