“Bridge-building” is a metaphor for deliberate interactions between communities and people that don’t always meet naturally. It’s used by marriage counsellors, teachers and by peacemakers. However social fragmentation is not as plainly two-sided as a bridge, and this work highlights essential but small, behind-the-scenes connections. The title of this work, “Political statement not for a
This artist book is an exact reproduction of one 1969 German edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (Wer die Nachtigall Stört). I found it in the former central Stasi remand prison in Berlin. Inside, there is a meta-text of phrases that inmates underlined with their fingernails, and markings by Stasi wardens and other officials who
The pilot study for the Reading Hohenschönhausen project happened in the winter of 2017 during an artist residency in Berlin. I was continuing my research on carved graffiti and visited the Stasi prison memorial Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, where I saw markings on the walls and in books left by political prisoners from about 1982-1989. The markings deal
Unbound is a work of drawings and poetry in preparation for an installation. The cut-up poetry (see below) of Unbound is an ambiguous collaboration: the lines in the poems are phrases set out by anonymous inmates at the secret Stasi prison, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in the 1980s. I work with these texts translated from German to English because
In History, Sideways the past is represented in a palimpsest of scratched graffiti that I found and copied from different places and periods of time in Cyprus. Most of these inscriptions had not been recorded before and some no longer exist, so the process of finding is an essential part of my process. I have
These selected works are based on frottages, or rubbings of historical ship graffiti that I saw on walls of the ruined Church of St. George of the Greeks, in Famagusta, Cyprus. The graffiti date from c.1570 to 1920 and they are represented at real size. I also do not modify the graffiti, and this includes
These works specifically overlap drawing and writing and blur the boundaries in between. Through repetition and copying (tracing), they are plays on authenticity and experiments with the look of speed. As a child, I saw my grandmother’s household notes in stenography which I understood as her private script. Her notes came to mind again after
Histories and biographies grow through discussions across tables, while people sit on chairs and as they pass by objects in their environment. Things, Witnesses! – also called Amanuensis – is a project about these silent witnesses to history. It is a kinetic installation where inanimate objects move, with a pencil. Visitors trigger motion detectors, indirectly
Psychopomp is a series of silkscreen prints based on graffiti from a “ghost station” in the former East Berlin underground, dating between 1950 – 1989. The content of what I found ranged from silly to fascist, and it presented different questions from other graffiti I had worked with: whether political intention – or any subjective