Haut aus Stein

With this work I turn my gaze to what remains when social and political orders lose their hold and tip over into violence. The point of departure for the triptych are bunker installations on the Danish coast, relics of the Atlantic Wall from the Second World War. They stand for the moment in which ideology becomes action, in which borders are no longer imagined but built and enforced by force. In their impact marks, fractures, and erosions they carry the visible traces of that decision to this day.

What interests me is less the historical document than the consequence inscribed within it. The work does not look at the moment of the turn itself, but at what comes after. At those states that can no longer be undone. At traces without return. At the center of the three-panel work stands the impact of a shell. Heat, pressure, and destruction have altered the concrete, partially dissolved it, and turned it into an almost fabric-like structure. Forms emerge that seem organic, as if the stone itself had begun to react. The inside turns outward.

In its arrangement as a triptych, this condensation gains a further charge. The work opens like an altarpiece, though not in a religious sense, but as a place of confrontation. What becomes visible here demands to be looked at. It points to a form of remembrance that cannot be evaded. Although the work was made in 2018, it appears today with new urgency. In a present of growing geopolitical tension and new wars, our sense of stability shifts. What long seemed distant draws closer. The traces of past violence begin to overlay the present.

The photographic condensation releases the structures from their original context and turns them into carriers of a state that has not passed. The focus on details makes the pain almost physically tangible. The stone no longer appears rigid, but vulnerable. The work understands war not as a concluded event, but as a latent possibility. It points to those inconspicuous transitions in which order becomes unrest and unrest becomes destruction, and to the traces that remain once that point has been crossed.