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Delia Jürgens

conceptual artist | painter, poet

Poems

Like a butter(ed)-fly (2021)

side by side (2019)

And their interconnectedness (2021)

The desert‘s eye. (2019)

Hallo Hallo

Delia Jürgens

Fragmented Landscapes

Paintings

Delia Jürgens

Landingpage

Reflections

Coming from Reality

Echoes in Rain

The Future is but a second away

Cloud Storage

In Response to

We thought they were Windows, but actually they are Mirrors

A Morning full of Dust, you‘re half inside and half Way out

Reflections of a City

Life is an infinite Line [several Diodes triggering]

BAWARIH RIFT – Part I (viscous Pixels)

XO – Image Carrier. Filling the Gap

Who fake am I now

New Painting

Wald

Lockdown Paintings (SUMER + FLASHES

PAE

Wald

Concrete Paintings

Frozen in the Index of Time

Facades | Windows | Entities

Facades

99 Cent Paintings

Chakras

CHAKRAS + FADINGS

Nudes

Horizons | Links | Plastic Fossils

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BIO | CV | CONTACT

mail [at] djuergens [dot] com

@deliajuergens | @__strmg_

Delia Jürgens is a painter and poet living between Hanover (GER) and Los Angeles (USA).

Her work deals with the ambiguity of life in today’s world shaped by global economics and digital networks. She reflects on how economic and cultural values are created and how they affect the individual and collective consciousness or body. By establishing a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver, she focuses on concrete questions that determine our existence. Jürgens wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images. Her works show how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and challenge the binaries we continually reconstruct between the Self and the Other. The results of her multilayered works are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted while creating a new way of painting. Rather than presenting a factual reality, she shows an illusion fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination in a dense imagery that can be both – spatial and fictional – existing in the gap between and the dependence of one another.

Growing up cross-culturally with German and Moroccan traditions as well as Asian philosophies Jürgens evolved a deep understanding of the interconnectivity of economical, social and traditional beliefs and how the development of identity formation is evidentiary and based on its environments. She investigates those dynamics of landscape and the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’ to reference postcolonial theory where origins are interwoven but yet not always genetic or visible.

Delia Jürgens holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the Braunschweig University of Arts where she studied with the German-American artist and professor of painting Frances Scholz and a BFA in Scenographics from the University of Applied Arts and Sciences Hannover. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou (CHN), the Sprengel Museum Hannover (GER), the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (GER), the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (GER), the Heidelberger Kunstverein (GER), the Kunstverein Hannover (GER), Garden Gallery Los Angeles (US), _Tim Nolas Vienna (AUT), Clages Gallery, (GER) and the Kunstverein Langenhagen (GER) among others. She received the artist in residence stipend of the Künstlerhaus Meinersen (2015), the working grant of the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (2016) and the working grant of the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2019) and was honored with the Sprengel Price for Visual Arts of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung and the Sprengel Museum in 2018.

Jürgens is the founder of the avant-garde and interdisciplinary project and collective DIS-PLAY.

DIS-PLAY exhibits the blend of virtual versus physical prospects showing different but interwoven collective reality states on the merge of a live piece of art, an artist collective, an online exhibition format and an art platform. Each virtual appearance occurs physically at a different venue across cultures, countries and time zones and brings together a wide array of artists and people to engage and rethink the actual. DIS-PLAY argues that the possibilities that the internet offers for self-organization and the sharing of information are undermined by often hidden power structures of economics and meditates on ideas of collectivity and togetherness.

Born in Hanover, Germany
Lives and works between Hanover (GER) and Los Angeles (USA)

Education

2014 | MFA: Braunschweig University of Art, Fine Arts

2011 | BA: University of Media and Design Hanover, Scenographics

2006 | Leibniz University Hanover, Geosciences

Awards, Scholarships, Prizes

2022 | Neustart Kultur, the federal Association and the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media

2021 | Nomination for the prize of the Kunststiftung Erich Hauser by Daria Mille

2020 | Nomination Ars Viva Prize by Kathleen Rahn / Kunstverein Hannover

2020 | Shortlist Strabag Art Award

2020 | Shortlist Villa Massimo Rome

2019 | Working grant of the Stiftung Kunstfonds

2019 | Nomination Großer Hans-Purrmann-Preis der Stadt Speyer by Frances Scholz

2018 | Sprengel Prize of the Sprengel Museum and the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung

2017 | Nomination Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation by Christina Végh and Elmas Senol

2017 | Nomination Artist-in-Residence Goethe Institute Qatar by Elke aus dem Moore

2016 | Working grant of the Ministry of Science and Culture, Lower Saxony

2016 | Nomination Artist-in-Residence Goethe Institute Dublin by Elke aus dem Moore

2015 | Artist-in-Residence Künstlerhaus Meinersen

Solo Exhibitions

2022 | Wireless Connection, Glashaus, Jena, Germany

2021 | Coming from Reality, Clages Galerie / die Kabine / worldwideweb, Cologne / Hanover, Germany

2020 | f4f0_0t4t: was bleibt, Konnektor - Forum für Künste, Hanover, Germany, curated by Boris von Hopffgarten

2019 | The Future is but a Second away, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, curated by Carina Plath

2017 | in response to, 34°12'52.6''N 116°27'18.0''W, Joshua Tree (CA), United States

2017 | Echoes in Rain, Ihme-Zentrum, Hanover, Germany

2016 | Untrodden Areas, Künstlerhaus Meinersen, Meinersen, Germany

2016 | Cloud Storage, Speisesaal, Brunswick, Germany / Kyoto, Japan

2015 | Life is an infinite Line [several Diodes triggering], Kunstraum 53, Hildesheim, Germany, curated by Julian Obertopp

2015 | BAWARIH RIFT - PART I (viscous pixels), Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen, Germany, curated by Ursula Schöndeling

2014 | XO - Image Carrier. Filling the Gap., Graduationshow, HBK, Brunswick, Germany

Group Exhibitions

2022 | Wireless Connection, Glashaus, Jena, Germany

2021 | Coming from Reality, Clages Galerie / die Kabine / worldwideweb, Cologne / Hanover, Germany

2020 | f4f0_0t4t: was bleibt, Konnektor - Forum für Künste, Hanover, Germany, curated by Boris von Hopffgarten

2019 | The Future is but a Second away, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, curated by Carina Plath

2017 | in response to, 34°12'52.6''N 116°27'18.0''W, Joshua Tree (CA), United States

2017 | Echoes in Rain, Ihme-Zentrum, Hanover, Germany

2016 | Untrodden Areas, Künstlerhaus Meinersen, Meinersen, Germany

2016 | Cloud Storage, Speisesaal, Brunswick, Germany / Kyoto, Japan

2015 | Life is an infinite Line [several Diodes triggering], Kunstraum 53, Hildesheim, Germany, curated by Julian Obertopp

2015 | BAWARIH RIFT - PART I (viscous pixels), Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen, Germany, curated by Ursula Schöndeling

2014 | XO - Image Carrier. Filling the Gap., Graduationshow, HBK, Brunswick, Germany

Artist Talks, Presentations, Collaborations, Interdisciplinary Projects

2022 | Wireless Connection, Glashaus, Jena, Germany

2021 | Coming from Reality, Clages Galerie / die Kabine / worldwideweb, Cologne / Hanover, Germany

2020 | f4f0_0t4t: was bleibt, Konnektor - Forum für Künste, Hanover, Germany, curated by Boris von Hopffgarten

2019 | The Future is but a Second away, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, curated by Carina Plath

2017 | in response to, 34°12'52.6''N 116°27'18.0''W, Joshua Tree (CA), United States

2017 | Echoes in Rain, Ihme-Zentrum, Hanover, Germany

2016 | Untrodden Areas, Künstlerhaus Meinersen, Meinersen, Germany

2016 | Cloud Storage, Speisesaal, Brunswick, Germany / Kyoto, Japan

2015 | Life is an infinite Line [several Diodes triggering], Kunstraum 53, Hildesheim, Germany, curated by Julian Obertopp

2015 | BAWARIH RIFT - PART I (viscous pixels), Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen, Germany, curated by Ursula Schöndeling

2014 | XO - Image Carrier. Filling the Gap., Graduationshow, HBK, Brunswick, Germany

Bibliography

“The opening Response”, by Josseline Black-Barnett, November 2020, Umbigo Magazine
“Strabag Art Award”, March 2020, Strabag Art Forum
“Echoes in Rain”, by Ursula Schöndeling, October 2019, HDKV
“6th Guangzhou Triennial – As we may think”, by Gu Ling, February 2019, OCULA
“The Downward Spiral – Pearl River Diary”, by Dean Kissick, January 2019, Spike Art Magazine
“Künstler*innen die uns aufgefallen sind”, Jens Hinrichsen, December 2018, Monopol
“Delia Jürgens kombiniert Digitales und Analoges”, December 2018, Süddeutsche Zeitung
“Olivenschlieren und Öllachen” by Bettina Maria Brosowsky, December 2018, TAZ
“Delia Jürgens Sprengel-Preis” by Carina Plath, November 2018
“Delia Jürgens im Sprengel Museum”, Henning Queren, November 2018, Neue Presse
“Zwischen Jetzt und Gleich”, November 2018, H1
“Sprengel Preis für Delia Jürgens”, October 2018, Kunstforum
“Challenger Deep”, Ezequiel Olvera, October 2018, Medium
“Challenger Deep”, Garden Gallery Los Angeles, September 2018, Tzvetnik
“Challenger Deep”, Garden Gallery Los Angeles, August 2018, CurateLA
“88. Herbstausstellung”, Kunstverein hannover, August 2018, eflux
“1938. Birthday Party with Guests”, Sophie Wright, March 2018, British Journal of Photography
“Geburtstag mit Gästen”, Henning Queren, March 2018, Neue Presse
“1938. Geburtstagsfest mit Gästen”, March 2018, Sprengel Blog
“Was Menschen im Aufzug tun”, Daniel Schacht, Christina Sticht, March 2018, dewezet
“Delia Jürgens erhält den Sprengel-Preis”, March 2018, Tiefgang
“Sprengel-Preis 2018 für Delia Jürgens”, Daniel A. Schacht, February 2018, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung
“Sprengel Preis für Delia Jürgens”, Daniel A. Schacht, February 2018, Göttinger Tageblatt
“Delia Jürgens erhält den Sprengel Preis”, February 2018, Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung
“Hybrid Layers – ein Kurzportrait”, January 2018, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
“vienna contemporary”, Kristina Kulakova, January 2018
“in response to”, Zachary Korol-Gold, January 2018, earth sciences
“in response to”, November 2017, Tzvetnik
“Hybrid Layers”, October 2017, OFluxo
“Hybrid Layers”, October 2017, Tzvetnik
“Cyber Corporeality”, October 2017 Art Viewer
“Cyber Corporeality”, August 2017 PW Magazine
“Adieu Engholm, Hello Sanatorium Gallery” by Sabine B. Vogel, August 2017
“Sanatorium Gallery in Vienna” by Sabrina Steinek, August 2017, exhibist
“MATERIALISIERTE BILDER” by Annekathrin Kohout, July 2017, sofrischsogut
“Hybrid Layers”, June 2017, Deutschlandfunk
“Hybrid Layers”, June 2017, Mousse Magazine
“Hybrid Layers”, June 2017, art-in.de
“Hybrid Layers”, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, May 2017, eflux
“Hybrid Layers” by Regina Hock, May 2017, Presseportal
“VG Art Award ‘17 | abstract, concrete, absolute” by Elmas Senol, March 2017, Kestnergesellschaft
“Perfect Rectangeles” by Jonny Coleman, June 2016, in Untrodden Areas, DIS-PLAY
“ABC for DJ” by Marcus Steinweg, June 2016, in Untrodden Areas, DIS-PLAY
“Materializations” by Sabiha Keyif, June 2016, KubaParis
“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR” by Philipp Ziegler, June 2016, artipool
“Life is an infinite Line [several Diodes triggering]” by Julian Obertopp, November 2015, Kunstraum 53
“Die Macht der Pixel in der Kunst” by Bettina Maria Brosowsky, March 2015, TAZ

Publications

“Delia Jürgens. Nocturne in Daylight – in seven movements -“, DIS-PLAY, Berlin, Los Angeles, August 2021, ISBN: 978-3-949444-01-2
“Falling off the Edges – Reality from a different Angle”, DIS-PLAY, Berlin, Los Angeles, October 2019
“Scratches of Use and Traces left”, HDKV, Heidelberg, October 2019
“Pa(c)e – trying to keep it real”, DIS-PLAY, Berlin / Los Angeles, 2019
“Everlasting Light”, _Tim Nolas, Vienna, Austria, June 2019
“As We May Think: Feedforward’””, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, December 2018 粤ICP备12071615号-2
“ALONG THE LINE”, Tzvetnik, Moskow, December 2017
“COSMIC SKELETON” in Band I von X, DIS-PLAY, Los Angeles, Berlin, December 2017, ISBN: 978-1985222342
“La Nuit Blanche”, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, March 2017
“Materializations”, 2017, KubaParis
“The Like Button in HD”, Lodos Gallery / Museo el Eco, Mexico City, 2016
“Delia Jürgens. Untrodden Areas”, DIS-PLAY, Berlin, Los Angeles, June 2016, ISBN 978-3-00-055715-6
“Raumstationen, Kunstverein Hannover, Hanover, 2015, ISBN 978-3-934421-54-7
“Delia Jürgens. XO”, self published, Berlin, July 2014
“IchIchIch, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Brunswick, April 2012
“Nomadische Unschärfen”, Temporary Gallery Cologne, 2011

Private and Public Collections

Frances Scholz
Kunstverein Hannover
Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung / Sprengel Museum Hannover
Rosemarie Trockel
Sabine DuMont Schütte

Info

BIO | CV | CONTACT

Texts / Reviews

COMING FROM REALITY soundtrack for COMING FROM REALITY by 4gotten_MORB

THE OPENING RESPONSE conversation with Josseline Black-Barnett

THE OPENING RESPONSE conversation with Josseline Black-Barnett

in conversation with Josseline Black

Reflecting on this recent period of forced isolation, how are you articulating your response in a public discourse? What is your role in this larger conversation?

At the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the first lockdown I was in Los Angeles. It was a quite different experience than here in Germany where I am right now. I was sheltering in place for 5 months, didn’t socially engage, ordered groceries mostly online and worked isolated in the studio. Here in Germany it’s different. Everything feels almost usual just that everyone wears a mask in public space. It is possible to see exhibitions, meet people and have an art exchange.

My perspective and approach towards my art practice tilts every time I’m in the US in general but even more since the changes that came with the pandemic. Over there I always feel a much bigger responsibility to address topics that are more politically and socially related. As an artist, I see my role in questioning given formation processes, how they create value and how identity is shaped today. I try to address that over social media, in example Instagram stories and livestreams. I think Instagram actually has the potential of being able to reach a wide array of people from very different backgrounds to reshape one’s own sight. I tried making use of it while posting relevant content between my art practice, my daily life thoughts and quotes of specific actual topics to present a position towards the actual politics instead of creating a fake reality with images that show luxurious goods like foods in a restaurant or vacation panoramas as many other people are using it for.

Has your artistic practice changed through isolation? How has your practical capacity to produce work been affected by the pandemic?

My work changed in the past year. Usually I worked directly in and with the exhibition space. I created huge site specific paintings with the approach to work with the actual dynamics and architecture of the specific space I was invited to show my work in. I called that group of work Fragmented Landscapes. Since a year and a bit I am more interested in working on smaller paintings that are able to be autonomous (from the space they are shown in, from budget and from other external dynamics). I think the lockdown and its force to work from home brought an interesting perspective of intimacy into my work. In Los Angeles I had a different situation with a garden and a separate studio space in the backyard of the house. In Germany I am actually working in my apartment. I love to wake up and look at my works right away without having any other visual experience before, like biking to a studio or taking the bus and passing passengers. I think such an immediacy brings a very specific directness and gaze into focus. You start to look from your inner landscape and your own gaze instead of from a common economically preshaped perspective. Such a situation might have more enriching potential to reflect on society, reality and truth than a very economically organized working process.

What is your approach to collaboration at the moment?

I’ve always been interested in collaborations. I believe in the power of visuality and always thought working with someone or a group of people in a visual way gives a lot of perspective. To me such a communication seems very direct and almost innocent.

During the lockdown in March I started working closely with my artist friend Carlotta Drinkewitz. We started to use Instagram as a studio and created paintings together through Livestreams. Our material was the soil of our locations – mine from the porch in Los Angeles and Carlotta’s from a public meadow in Brunswick – in combination with fabrics. We continued working on those paintings digitally and are now – as we met at the same place and physically – bringing the digital paintings back into a physical materialization.

Parallel to that I founded an art collective called DIS-PLAY some years ago which is actually doing a diary series throughout the pandemic. We think about time in relation with the different circumstances and what that means as an artist and for making art. We used Instagram story fragments throughout the first wave of the pandemic to create and generate content which we now publish in a manifested video diary via IG TV throughout the second wave. The delay of the waves and the gaps that are created by the different locations one is at seems to create an interesting field for actual and independent thought.

How would you define the present moment, metaphysically/literally/symbolically?

I think it’s like the desert. Or the desert in the synonyme of the ocean.

A halt in the stream of dynamics and transformation processes that actually and literally pauses for reflection on the given. It’s like the silent eye of a storm. You have to watch out in which strata you put yourself into.

Do you see the potential for renewed support for cultural production in spite of macro and micro economies which are currently rapidly restructuring?

I do.

I have been living between Los Angeles, Berlin and Hanover since almost 5 years now and am very used to being in touch with friends and curators through digital communication formats. When the lockdown and its huge shift into the digital space and realm happened, I suddenly felt home. Sort of thinking: ‘Finally everyone else feels how I have been feeling since the past years.’ It’s not always easy to keep in touch in long distance relationships, both private and work related. Not everyone is able to trust in virtual communication formats. A lot of people still believe that physical touch is ‘more’ real than the virtual one so they lose touch and interest if you’re not able to visit them physically.

Since the lockdown, especially in Germany, there are a lot of funding opportunities from the government to shift cultural production into digital space. In America it seems as if it’s more privately funded and organized. I’m not sure if the support is sufficient. It will be interesting to observe if money will be put into micro economies which might have a more independent and more efficient approach and experience than in macro economies whose interest might be primarily to sustain the given institutions. Nevertheless, I think it’s a moment in history where everyone understands how much we depend on one another – not only by the experience of protecting each other through masks and how thin the line is between one’s own and the others’ space – we might understand how easily major effects can be caused by very small intrusions and mistakes.

E.M. Cioran writes: “in major perplexities, try to live as history was done with and to react like a monster riddled by serenity”, how do you respond to this proposal?

I think I relate to it.

How is this time influencing your perception of alterity in general?

I think the BLM movement shows the general response to it very clearly. Maybe we understand that we don’t differ that much from one another – we can all be affected by the virus and feel pretty much the same anxiety or vulnerability. To me personally this time shows the indifference of humans, but unfortunately the economic effects will produce huge economic differences and a lot of people will suffer.

What is your position on the relationship between catastrophe and solidarity?

I don’t really believe in either of them. I am usually pretty balanced and take things how they appear or happen instead of seeing them in an ultimate perspective.

For the effects of SARS-CoV2 in relation to catastrophe and solidarity I think the real catastrophe is how the human species behaves with the planet and towards a lot of other species. I truly believe that everyone should start thinking about reducing one’s own benefits, lifestyles and the spaces they occupy. How that occupation has an invisible chain of effects for others.

What is your utopia now?

My utopia is pretty dreamy. I wanna believe in the positive effects all this is bringing us into. I remember how different Los Angeles was after 2 or 3 weeks of lockdown. Usually you always hear traffic and are in a mist of pollution. You don’t really know your neighbours because everyone is always in their own house, in their cars or in indoor frames like the fitness studio or other clubs. After and through the lockdown birds you’ve never heard before were singing and came back to their habitats, the air felt clear and the sun was actually visible as rays not behind a hazy cloud. People were on the streets walking or exercising and getting more in touch although they socially distanced than before. The utopia, I wanna believe in is that there will be a restart and that the effects of economic failure will be positive for the planet and other species but I know it’s an utopia.

Delia Jürgens is a painter and installation artist living between Hanover, Berlin and Los Angeles.

Her work deals with the ambiguity of life in today’s world shaped by global economics and digital networks. Jürgens reflects on how economic and cultural values are created and how they affect the individual and collective consciousness or body. She establishes a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver and focuses on concrete questions that determine our existence. Jürgens wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images. Her works show how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between the Self and the Other. The results of her multilayered installations are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted while creating a new way of painting. Rather than presenting a factual reality, she shows an illusion fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination in a dense imagery that can be both spatial and fictional existing in the dependence of one another. She investigates in the dynamics of landscape and the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’ referencing postcolonial theory.

Delia Jürgens received her MFA in Fine Arts from the Braunschweig University of Arts in 2014 where she studied with the German-American artist and professor of painting Frances Scholz and a BFA in Scenographics from the University of Applied Arts and Sciences Hannover. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou (CHN), the Sprengel Museum Hannover (GER), the ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (GER), the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (GER), the Heidelberger Kunstverein (GER), the Kunstverein Hannover (GER), Garden Gallery Los Angeles (US), _Tim Nolas Vienna (AUT) and the Kunstverein Langenhagen (GER) among others. She received the artist in residence stipend of the Künstlerhaus Meinersen (2015), the working grant of the MWK Lower Saxony (2016) and the working grant of the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2019) and was honored with the Sprengel Price for Visual Arts of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung and the Sprengel Museum in 2018.

Delia Jürgens is the founder of the art collective DIS-PLAY.

DIS-PLAY exhibits the merge of virtual versus physical prospects beyond a physical representation in a fusion of different reality states. Each virtual appearance occurs physically at a different venue across cultures, countries and time zones and brings together a wide array of artists and people to engage and rethink the actual. DIS-PLAY argues that the possibilities that the internet offers for self-organization and the sharing of information are undermined by often hidden power structures of economics and meditates on ideas of collectivity and togetherness.

SPRENGEL PRIZE laudatory by Carina Plath

SPRENGEL PRIZE laudatory by Carina Plath

Dear Delia,

Dear Sirs and Madams,

while we are coming together for this award ceremony, there are several works by Delia Jürgens that you could see. On the one hand the work created for our insight hall with the title The Future is but a Second Away, secondly, in distant California a work in the desert near the Joshua Tree National Park with the title in response to [Draußen. Outside. Dozens of my Fingerprints washed away], which has been permanently installed there since 2017. Finally, a video showing a flag that Delia Jürgens, together with Tarik Kentouche, has positioned in various landscapes and whose picture can be seen online in the virtual exhibition space DIS-PLAY.

The simultaneity of different presences is a characteristic of Delia Jürgens works, in the real distant space, in the nearby and in the virtual. At the same time, it is a characteristic of our time, which was accelerated by the virtual levels that came into our world with the world wide web. Just as I opened several windows on my computer desktop while writing these speech notes, Jürgens’ works always open different depth spaces and time levels in parallel. If you look at the work in the desert, not only because of the location of the California desert you quickly think of the land art artists like Michael Heizer or Robert Smithson, who worked in the vastness of the landscape. In example Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements (1969) in mexican yucatan. Jürgens’ work certainly draws inspiration from this landscape and from this heritage. Nature can recapture the work in which it was used. The fingerprints addressed in the title “Dozens of my Fingerprints washed away”, the artist’s individual trace, disappear and remain as a memory. And yet there are details of how the 99 cent store stickers on the mirrors show Jürgens’ different and typical approach. Her interest in the contexts and origins of the materials; the studio in Chinatown L.A. plays into it, the cheap products that can be found there. For her, each material has its own context, which she brings to the speech in different dimensions.

Already with her Master thesis XO – Image Carrier. Filling the Gap 2014 at Braunschweig University of Arts, the opening into different levels, the own way of creating image units by layering and laying various materials, as well as thinking from one’s own body to a wide network is legible. In a mixture of printouts, cheap products such as LED glasses or self-adhesive silicone bras, self-portraits that come as paper cartridges for energy drinks, but also read literature and her own sketchbooks, Jürgens passes through several levels of the pictorial. One detail exemplifies Jürgens way of thinking and working: colorfully printed leggings are found on removable frames laid out on the floor; the pattern on them was created from photographs of a soundprint of a body in the bathtub; these were pulled up until the pixels become visible and applied to the leggings using an image film. This replaces the absent physicality with a digital image, which shows the negative shape of the body itself and is added to the leg cover. Here the artist works on the representation of the physical, works through what has been lost in haptics and leads it to a different, new tangibility on the visual level.

Jürgens works so early on look into a world that can be felt as a reality of life shaped by digital media, its new possibilities of perception and mobility. The artist also calls her dynamic works materializations, as temporary solidifications in a dynamic environment. As with the leggings described, digital images materialize in them, often by printing on acrylic glass surfaces and sleeping bags and carpets, creating a tension between the technoid images and soft and yielding surfaces. In the case of materially present surfaces such as the large paraffin surfaces in the work here, mirrors and glasses are used to dematerialize them. Different densities from ceramic tiles and concrete to fabric and acrylic glass to the water-storing decorative beads, which have something evolutionary about them with their association of fish spawning and absorb and release water, show the full range of materials in her works. Due to the various presences and their processing, they also have different degrees of reality, from the directly deformed paraffin to the digitally processed image part.

In this way, Jürgen’s work can be understood as a constant questioning of the reality of things without the analog and digital being seen in a hierarchy or genealogy. On the one hand there are the contexts from which they come – the hardware store as the basis of our surroundings, the Internet as a goods handling center, the cheap shops that offer kitsch and wellbeing things. The artist makes use of all three and lets these contexts resonate in her works and stand side by side as simultaneous realities. She uses some of these diverse materials in their raw state, such as styrofoam from the hardware store, which still bears the barcode as the code for the global market economy, or in a more refined state, such as the sleeping bags printed with film. They are layered and laid and brought into dynamic constellations that leave their loose shape obvious. How they are merged is then different in new contexts. Delia Jürgens works with a kind of nomadic form of work. For example Cloud Storage, a work that has existed in various materializations since 2016. In the former University’s dining room in Braunschweig, in a gallery in Vienna, in the Ihme-Zentrum Hanover and most recently here in the group exhibition 1938 – Geburtstagsfest mit Gästen in dialogue with works by Daido Moriyama. Central of this piece is the acrylic banner, on which the image of a water flow is printed and which runs through the respective rooms like a transparent waterfall. Like the water, the cloud in the title is the hallmark of this work. The cloud as ephemeral phenomena of condensed liquid, at the same time the cloud also as the storage of data and images, as we call them today, and by which many of us are surrounded.

Nomadism is also expressed in the virtual exhibition room entitled DIS-PLAY, which Jürgens runs together with Tarik Kentouche. In it, images and videos of various artists are continuously shown online in parallel. The simultaneous worlds fluctuate between black and white cell phone videos from the airplane window and colored recordings of a performance, tours through exhibitions and short texts. Images streamed partly live, partly archived, also show the movements and various stays of this nomadic artist, whose work is temporarily solidified in projects and then set out again. In this way, Juergens’ work not only expands through the numerous references and origins of her materials, but also through collaborations and the provision of opportunities for other artists. It is not surprising that, in the classic sense, she is a networker who takes up the multiple relationships of things and people as an infinite potential in her work.

The future is but a Second away, as the title of the newly created work, refers to the future and at the same time to the moment of pausing before something happens. Suddenly there is a gap between the now and the soon. This is the gap in the work of Jürgens, which could also be read as the crystallization of a process or as sedimentation. A situation briefly solidifies in a room and is updated by the viewer. In the insight hall of the museum, this is particularly accentuated by the large glass panes and the perceptible change in light, especially in the course of the afternoon. The artist responds to this with a variety of reflective glass and mirror surfaces that incorporate the surroundings into the parts of the work.

The constellations, such as here or working in the desert, show that her career began with studying scenography parallel to studying painting at the Braunschweig University of Arts with Frances Scholz. Most of the time, Jürgens sees herself as a painter. Her new work contains images of all kinds. A key element are the often used digital images of rocks and water surfaces. They show a fundamentally media-related approach to landscape. If Jürgens uses predefined photographs from image databases available online, the detachment from a certain landscape is predefined. The excerpt is not location- or time-specific. The pre-produced images are stored on the Internet in memories from which they can be called up at any time. The artist forms the found images and partially zooms them insofar that the eye is lost in pixels and the digital depth space opens up like an infinite one. The dimensions implode so that micro- and macrocosms tip into each other. Just as surfing through Google Earth offers a new approach to unknown landscapes, into which you can zoom in and out and which you can enter digitally, this process is anchored in the details of Jürgens’ pictorial thinking. As with these sections of the landscape, the artist deals with the media images and painterly aspects in a variety of ways. Digital images are printed on sleeping bags or satin banners and inserted into a larger installation, which in itself is pictorial. The picture carriers themselves are ephemeral or refer to temporary statics, be it with the sleeping bag as an image of nomadism, with advertising banners or with the imprints in paraffin. Black polymer beads that store water and are filled into aquarium-like glass cubes release moisture that is deposited on the glass surfaces – a process image that changes with the climate of the room. The respective pictures are shown in states of consolidation and dissolution. If the digital image of a pixelated, in the words of Jürgens “deconstructed” stone is applied to an acrylic banner and suspended freely in the room, the result opens up a wide scale between extreme transparency and the highest material density. The use of the paraffin liquefied in the image creation process in The Future is but a Second away results in dense surfaces made up of several colored layers, which in some places are covered by reflective glass surfaces. At the same time, their physical appearance, which shows the frozen flow, again approaches the enlarged landscape sections on the fabric surfaces. The installation thus contains tensions of warm and haptic as well as colder and reflective materials, which seems to encompass a kind of natural law. In her text COSMIC SKELETON a higher plane of reflection appearing as particles of time in facts (2016) the artist tries to break down reality into levels of compression and physical content – the body, the mass as the weight, the projection, the gap as the most distant plane from the material. In her new work, she treads these levels from the printed sleeping bag, which as the body shell is closest to the haptic origin, through the cast paraffin surfaces, which change with the climate and warmth of the room and follow gravity to the fleeting reflections that can be described as the zero point of the picture the surroundings in the numerous mirror and glass surfaces. If you go into this room, you are not only guided into its depth by means of various densifications, but there are also recesses and nestings of different materials of various origins at each position. A long piece of paraffin on styrofoam lies rather to the side of the window. It has itself been cast on film so that it has a whitish layer like hoarfrost and shows the flow of its creation as a trace. A glass frame is placed on top of it, which frames a section like a picture, which it also frames in a greenish, transparent manner. In turn, a rolled piece of carpet is placed in it, which bears a digital image of stone as a pattern. In this way, a picture reality nestles into the other, lies on top of one another, interferes with it visually. Jürgens merges the image layers and lets them question each other. At the same time, they result in a materiality in space that also reflects and absorbs it. In the mirrors of different colors, there is a blackish dark mirror that is like deep water, the direct environment is brought into the work by the mirror images of the trees. In this way, we are guided into a dynamic structure that shows itself through references as not finite and as a fragment of a larger landscape. Fragmented Landscapes is also the name of the work group to which the work belongs. You can move around and Delia Jürgens manages this landscape as a fragment of one to show the current living environment shaped by analog and digital realities.

„A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched.“ Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968)

If Delia Jürgens is an artist who can briefly grasp the fragmented reality of life for us as a potential of new experiences and I would like to allow her that, then it is an artistic achievement that deserves to be honored with this award.Thank you very much.

The Future is but a Second away text by Olga Nevzorova

The Future is but a Second away text by Olga Nevzorova

According to the rhetoric of modernism, the conditions of painting have been questioned repeatedly. The canvas overcame its function as artificial border, the genre-based painting was declined and concepts became images. The picturesque-installative works of this year’s Sprengel Preis winner Delia Jürgens nourish from that art historical narrative. With the Modus Operandi of the post-internet generation, and the quite natural use and manipulation of images from the World Wide Web and out of the traditional painting, Delia Jürgens layers virtual images and diverse materials on each other. She creates hybrid structures of analogue and digital realities, which openup polyvalent spaces and meanings. With a modular form of work – of situational, constantly rearranged materials, the artist establishes an aesthetic nomadism.

In the Einblickhalle (insight hall) of the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the artist explicitly explores the changing situation due to the temporality of light, material and perception. The eight positions of The Future is but a Second Away belong to the group of works Fragmented Landscapes. These minimalistic installations consist of fragments of an open structure that occur repeatedly in new constellations as soon as the viewer moves in the roomspace. Due to their composition, partly flat positioned on the floor, partly vertical hanging in the room, they trigger associations of landscapes. This specific relationship between inside and outside is enhanced by the large window front and the numerous reflections in the mirror and glass surfaces, which to a certain extent describe a zero point of the pictorial. Due to the strong reference of the space to the environment, the positions act like pixels or fragments of the environment itself.

The artist uses a variety of materials from different contexts. Styrofoam is an opaque layer; a cheap mass-produced good that is both omnipresent and invisible in everyday life. The carpet and the sleeping bags are hi-tech fabrics that are printed or woven from edited image-data of rockstructures. The data comes from the Internet, an almost infinite image database, which can be accessed at any time and Delia Jürgens speaks of the deconstruction of these stereotyped images. The shape of the paraffin changes with the temperature fluctuations of the time of the day.

The Aqualinos (water-storing pearls) act as a permeable membrane. Their evaporation changes both climates, in the glass boxes in which they are stored and in the roomspace. Like in a painting, Delia Jürgens composes the various materials upon each other and in this way adds the level of transparency to the colours and haptics of an artwork. They transform aesthetically into hybrid forms. Each layer gives the work a further level in space and interpretation of virtual and analogous realities. The artist speaks of her works as “materializations”: They are transitory consolidations in a dynamic environment whose fragments, through their materiality and references, always point beyond themselves and thus add a perceptual-psychological dimension to the positioning of the self in its environment.

Delia Jürgens studied scenography at the University of applied Sciences and Arts Hannover with Colin Walker (2008-2011) and fine arts at the Braunschweig University of Art with Frances Scholz (2008-2014).

Olga Nevzorova (art historian and academic trainee at Sprengel Museum Hannover)

Delia Jürgens: The Future is but a Second away

Gemäß der Rhetorik der Moderne wurden die Bedingungen der Malerei immer wieder in Frage gestellt. Die Leinwand als künstliche Grenze wurde überwunden, mit der als Genre gefassten Malerei gebrochen und Konzepte als Bilder möglich. Aus diesem kunsthistorischen Narrativ nären sich die malerisch-installativen Werke der diesjährigen Sprengel-Preisträgerin Delia Jürgens. Mit dem Modus Operandi der Post-Internet-Generation der selbstverständlichen Nutzung und Manipulation von Bildern aus dem world wide web aus der Tradition der Malerei schichtet Delia Jürgens virtuelle Bilder und vielfältige Materialien übereinander. Sie erzeugt hybride Strukturen aus analogen und digitalen Lebenswirklichkeiten, in welchen sich polyvalente Räumlichkeiten eröffnen. Mit einer modularen Werkform von situationsbezogenen, immer wieder neu arrangierten Materialien begründet die Künstlerin ein ästhetisches Nomadentum.

In der Einblickshalle des Sprengel Museum Hannover setzt die Künstlerin sich explizit mit der durch Zeitlichkeit des Lichts, Materials und der Wahrnehmung veränderlichen Situation auseinander. Die 8 Positionen in The Future is but a Second away gehören zur Werkgruppe Fragmented Landscapes. Die minimalistischen Installationen bestehen aus Fragmenten eines offenen Gebildes, die immer wieder in neuen Konstellationen miteinander auftreten, sobald der Betrachtende sich im Raum bewegt. Durch ihre kompositorische, teils flache Positionierung auf dem Boden, teils vertikale Hängung im Raum werden zusätzlich landschaftliche Assoziationen geweckt. Diese Beziehung zwischen Innen und Außen wird durch die große Fensterfront und die zahlreichen Reflektionen des Raumes in den Spiegel- und Glasflächen, die gewissermaßen einen Nullpunkt des Bildhaften beschreiben, verstärkt. Durch die starke Referenz des Raumes zur Umgebung, wirken die Positionen wie Pixel oder Bruchstücke der Umgebung selbst.

Die Künstlerin verwendet eine Vielzahl von Materialien aus verschiedenen Kontexten. Das Styropor ist eine blickdichte Schicht; günstige Massenware, die gleichzeitig omnipräsent und unsichtbar im Alltag ist. Der Teppich und die Schlafsäcke sind Hi-Tech-Stoffe, die sie mit bearbeiteten Bilddaten von Gestein bedruckt oder weben lässt, Delia Jürgens spricht von der Dekonstruktion dieser stereotypen Bilder. Die Daten stammen aus dem Internet, aus einer schier unendlichen Bilderdatenbank, auf die jeder Zeit zugegriffen werden kann. Das Paraffin ist durch ist durch Temperaturschwankungen Tageszeiten abhängig formbar. Die Aqualinos (Wasserspeichernde Perlen) kommen als permeable Membran zum Tragen, die durch ihre Verdunstung sowohl in den Glaskästen, in denen sie aufbewahrt werden, wie auch das gesamte Raumklima verändern. Wie in der Malerei komponiert Delia Jürgens die verschiedenen Materialien auf- und zueinander und erweitert das Farbliche und Haptische um die Transparenz. Sie verbindet sie formästhetisch zu hybriden Formen. Jede Schicht gibt dem Werk eine weitere Ebene im Raum sowie in der Deutung der virtuellen und analogen Realitäten. Die Künstlerin spricht von ihren Arbeiten als „Materialisierungen“: es sind vorübergehende Verfestigungen in einer dynamischen Umgebung, deren Fragmente durch ihre Stofflichkeit und Referenzen auch immer über sich hinausweisen und somit eine wahrnehmnungspsychologische Dimension der Verortung des Selbst in seiner Umwelt hinzufügen.

Delia Jürgens studierte Szenografie an der Hochschule Hannover bei Colin Walker (2008-2011) und Bildende Kunst an der Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig Frances Scholz (2008-2014).

Olga Nevzorova (Kunsthistorikerin und Volontärin Sprengel Museum Hannover)

IMBECILES NOTEBOOK 3 soundtrack by 4Gotten Morb

ABC FOR DJ text by Marcus Steinweg

ABC FOR DJ text by Marcus Steinweg

ARCHÄOLOGIE – Archaeology

Archaeology is a sad science. Whilst archaeologists are digging for the origin (ρχή) they find ruins, shards and splinters, the clues of its inexistence. There is no intact origin. There are only fragments, remnants, sediments, debris, nebulae, dust of past eras.

Fictions of a ρχή that turns archaeology itself into fiction – a narrative, an aberration, a phantasm and adventure.

BEJAHUNG – Affirmation

Part of the affirmation is the acceptance of the unknown. Affirmation exists only as venture and generosity. She is: shouting out ‘yes’ to the uncertain, the greeting of ghosts. She is also a call for incommensurability, blindness, madness. But it is a sort of insanity without whom nor art nor thought could exist.

CLOUD – Cloud

Clouds are cushions. They are soft almost weightless, like ships navigating in the skies. They always carry hope, promises, illusions. At the least they carry the next rain. No human being lives without clouds. As carriers they are like nomads and form a caravan of floating camels. Even the tiniest dreams stick to them. A glance to the clouds blocks the sight and extends it to the invisible. Once the clouds clear we can see the sun.

DISPLAY – Display

It is always an offer. In most cases it offers not itself but others, the unknown, the strange, monsters or ghosts. The display implies a heterogeneous range of things. There are things to see whilst it activates the new ordering of its elements. It invites us to rearrange the world. Therefore it is political: Because it implies (undefined) orders – the mission to see, to think, to feel and to live differently than beforehand.

EVIDENZ – Evidence

Artworks are promises of evidence. We need to mistrust them, for only through the mistrust does the shimmer of evidence becomes visible to us. Only there in the lie, they do not lie.

FUNDSTÜCK – Found Object

Every found object expresses the wishes and projections of the finder. I never find anything. To be precise, it is the object that finds me, as if it was waiting for me to be found. The object that bumps into a subject and activates it. Dissolved into my world, the found object appeals to its strangeness, heterogeneity, and inconsistency. It tears a hole in the fine woven web of facts. All art that aims for more than confirmation of what we all know has to pass this hole.

GLÜCK – Luck

The luck is in the future and in the past. It has no presence or none other than its representatives, such as memory or expectation. As soon as it kicks in, it dissolves. It is only real in its disappearance.

HAUT – Skin

No life, no generation, no culture exists without its specific dreams and fictions. Each subject is coated in its own narratives. We won‘ t reveal a deeper layer of truth beyond the narrative. Without them the subject disappears. This doesn’t mean that there is no true life in the fictive. It signifies that the fictive life is also fiction – and a hope that Adorno sticks to ex negativo. The coating of the subject can be described as sediments of a collective unconscious. It could be interpreted as layers of skin., where molting is not excluded. One layer replaces the other. Sometimes the fiction of the fiction lessness becomes fiction = a dominant narrative.

IMAGINATION – Imagination

Is the capacity of imagining the absentee. As creative power, it accelerates the subject beyond its own realities. It allows the subject to fly, ignoring gravitation and aiming for the farthest future and past. Imagination is presence through absence: The extensive present.

JENSEITS – Beyond

The beyond is on this side, it is entirely part of world. The idea of positive ‘Hinterwelten’ (Nietzsche) belongs to the tradition of occidental Onto-theology. Thereby is the back inherent in the front, as the depth is to the surface. A new metaphysics should be surface metaphysics. It would examine the presence of the absent in the present. It would recognize reality and materiality as shimmering evidence of this absence. There is a beyond and it is here and now.

KOMPASS – Compass

Wherever the needle points to, nobody wanders life without compass. There is noone out there who doesn’t cling to narratives, might they be of mythic, religious, cultural or scientific nature. Every single critic of ideologies cannot be buoyed facing this simple fact derived from daily life observations. Only the one who confronts ideology with being unbetrayable and unreplaceable, might have access to a critical examination of the situation, whilst the latter does not gain in clarity.

LUFT – Air

There is no outside for there is no panoptic perspective. None of that kind that would allow to approach an eternal, encompassing order. We cannot even examine the material in its given standardized sense. The sense is lacking. Otherwise we have an overload of an overload of interpretation, evaluation, manipulation, shifting, deconstruction, instrumentalization of the empirical and materialistic givens. To think within the space of constituted reality and to navigate through it means to become contaminated and affected by it – leaving traces in it. One could attempt to speak of reciprocal determination, if determination was not attached to an inflexible concept of reality lacking the necessary freedom.

MATERIAL – Material

Our thinking is always threatened by stereotypes that are mono-causal and mono-perspective constructs. Those block our clear view on inconsistent, surreal and incommensurable parts of reality. Our handling of history (or of the so-called history, cause indeed, it isn’t about a coherent structure, which sense prevails in principle and which development strictly bound down to causality) will always be one with constructions and reconstructions of history. There is no historian out there who is not a translator. But the matter he translates is already itself product of translations other translators beyond his reach. It is about translations of translations: in the thinking, in the art, in what one could call speculative historiography. Art and philosophy participate in this as they operate within reality and history with the creation of their own material.

NARRATIV – Narrative

Reality is the promise of consistency that cannot be held up (analog to a well known part of the Aesthetic theory, in which Adorno defines art as ‘a promise of fortune that is refracted’^[1]). Artistic and philosophic thinking intensify their relation to reality through mistrust. This works only by hinting to its contingency: She is as she is but she is not necessarily as she is. She could be different. Such as history in general could have been different as she did. Part of the thinking is the continuous practice of zooming out of the narratives. Of those that we assume too often as reliable and necessary.

OFFENHEIT – Openness

The web woven of ‘known’ facts is not eternally determined it is open for alterations. There are zones that are undefined and areas of freedom. Those are products of the collision between a subject and the dominant narratives and evidences.

PRODUKT – Product

To think means to be brave enough to mistrust the evidence (what suggests and directs their naturalness a priori presumed as being unquestionable). The significance herein is the non acceptance of their authorities. Rather to vortex them through their transformation, reconfiguration, retranslation or, as Deleuze might have put it – their genesis. The latter is not only historical (in the sense of linear) but trans-historical within history. This is not related to idealism. It would be in opposition to every idealism, if it would not normally occur as realism without us noticing that what we call realism most of the time actually is another idealism. One might call this also idealism of facts or the belief in reality.

QUEER – Queer

Not the thought nor the sexuality are queer. It is the real itself that does not fit into the simplest patterns or indices. The queerness of the real turns it into an undeniable excessive demand. In the space of the latter we observe the subject jumping back and forth, not due to indecisiveness but due to knowing about the disparity, multiplicity and transformability of reality.

RELIKT – Relic

The past is stored in the relic. It is the evidence of its disappearance. It is present absence and therefore can only represent a fetish.

SYMBOL – Symbol

In ancient Greek the word means sign. Höderlin says we are undecipherable. But first of all we are surrounded by signs and we rely on those to orientate. Similar to a landmark, the symbol carries the promise for orientation. The symbol expresses a promise for sense and orientation that cannot be held up. That is why symbols have to be cracked like an oyster – to force them to reveal the hidden.

TRAUM – Dream

In dreams we have encounters of a specific kind. Whilst dreaming, the subject of improbability opens up in front of us. While awake, it exists in clearly defined borders. The dream opens this space, not because there is a hidden truth – but because the dreamer does not care about the truth.

UMGEBUNG – Surrounding

Regressive fantasy or actual wisdom: It means to merge with the surrounding, like Bataille’s animal that, after him, is like water in water.

VULGÄRARISTOTELISMUS – Vulgäraristotelismus

Artistic practice gains its relevance from the artists denial of reality. This has nothing to do with escapism. The opposite is true: the artistic practice enhances its contact to reality through removing its dominance. The artist as DJ, does not follow any strict line nor teleology or given sense in her practice. But it is experimental research that opens up the space to the undefined, the invisible, the uncharted territory. It is about the denial of the Vulgäraristotelismus, for the latter claims that everything exists already and that we shall accept our existence as bored-boring reconstructors of the given or past. It is far more alarming, even dramatic: there is more to invent and these inventions concern all realities in this world. It’s still out in the open, despite stable facts, irreversible history and an extensive lack of freedom. Despite alienation of the subject through its history and culture, despite economical imperatives, the dictatorship of ignorance that flood the entire planet.

WAHRHEIT – Truth

The subject floats within the richness of the existing as well as in the ontologically disparate. It floats in some sort of stream of contingency. The domain of the existing is particles of reality, is open and undefined. There is no eternal truth in it. In the contrary, it is rather as if its truth is to find in its own inconsistency. The promise of reality is reneged over and over again, for it is here where the thinking of philosophy and art operates and navigates.

XENOGRAPHIE – Xenography

One may call the artistic as well as the philosophical thinking xenographic. It is the registrar of the strangeness of a pretending familiar world. But thinking only exists through breaking with the familiarity.

YIING – Yiing

In ‘the Book of Changes’ Yiing light and night are differentiated in the same way as life and death are. But differently to the Occidental philosophy, the Chinese does not dramatize these differences.

Therefore in Chinese philosophy there is no need to synthesize these differences. In case this happens anyway, we are dealing rather with natural synthesises, where contrasts are only transitions. The subject itself is transition, a sort of multiplicity of different alternating states.

ZYNISMUS – Cynicism

The cynics will always have the determinism at hand to justify their passivity for everything is already decided. But this is not true. Our realities are fragile. This means that they are not eternally stable, they change. There remains a lot of space in the undefined. It is the undefined and contingency that allows for an open future (a future that was reducible on its past would not be one) – the inconsistency of our world. Art is this: the openness of the subject to these inconsistencies, operating with uncertainties and non existing evidence, the affirmation of the contingency of reality. The latter is prolonged wherever, whenever, why ever, always in the future, today ad infinitum to its farthest borders and beyond.

^[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, GW 7, Frankfurt a. M. 1970, S. 205.

IMBECILES NOTEBOOK soundtrack by 4Gotten Morb

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PERFECT RECTANGLES text by Johnny Coleman

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MATERIALIZATIONS conversation with Sabiha Keyif

MATERIALIZATIONS conversation with Sabiha Keyif

a conversation between Sabiha Keyif and Delia Jürgens – Part 1
Meinersen | Karlsruhe | Hannover | Los Angeles
winter 2015 – summer 2016

SK: By looking at your work one can make out different layers of materials as well as elements that you are reusing in different materializations. How would you describe the structure of your work and how do you organize it? Would you describe it as a sort of an archive you are working with or is it more a floating ongoing process? How do digital and materialized pieces relate to each other?

DJ: It’s a very visual out of the moment process. It might follow the back and forth practice you are used to in digital working procedures. In comparison to painting there is always a back and forth instead of the one and only ultimately set painting gesture. Immediately it inhabits and focuses on the momentary in my work. What I would relate to the digital impact on my artificial process. Everything is fluid. It can come out very differently. Just for a set moment, a situation, a time frame, it is how it looks and can’t be changed in between that relational fact. Maybe it’s indirectly structured as a kind of framework for itself.

My works have a kind of informational core, a kind of tissue with a functional structure. Dimensions like size, image carrier as well as the mobility of my work are centered. It can be materialized in many different ways and change its appearance but its core information stays even whether that information is elastic and can be stretched to relational facts too. Physically according to physical space as well as dynamically or meaningful through a specific focus I want the work expanding or being reduced for. Like if I want to point out a contentual fact of the work through focusing on a given element of the environment, an element of the work can become a server, being deformed or stretched to serve that specific fact in relation to a bigger topic like an exhibition with other artworks or architecture or nature surroundings and is more present through its absence or reduction as one example. It is finally but not necessarily materialized in the set situation or moment in relation to the given or created circumstances, scaled matterley. By materializing the works, the bodily reaction between the works, its surroundings and the viewer approaches to the center and ends in a very specific link of the different elements and layers in the show. Following one main set statement with an openness of the viewers linking process. The work can stay fluctuating and alive on a subtle level.

By mentioning an archive you might think about the work Who fake am I now – Art School’s Decor (ASD): Actual Contents to all the Citizens of HBK and other Art Schools from 2012. It is a kind of archive, an ongoing collection of global products I’m collecting since 4 years now, following the idea of a storage in

the sense of an Atlas or a baroque cabinet of wonder. I like the idea about decoration in the sense of trying to represent a kind of hidden information through its decoration, trying to represent truth that is twirled between different states, like social commitments as well as traditions or myths and illusions about life. Also in the way of being able to materialize something that is non materializable – that is fragile, like a ghost.

ASD was set as a humorous provocative statement of art school, art market, how art is being materialized to evoke a currency, the question of value, where value can be found or value of a piece and assessment in general. It’s a neutral portrait of moments that can be find in the decay of the products we are surrounded by as well as its impact how people live nowadays, what kind of illusions, imaginations and wishes they have about life – represented through the image of those plastic fossils (99-cent-dreams) in the sense of a souvenir. The piece is set in different physical links: products of the collection that are presenting an informational stream or line of thoughts often displayed in an easily found way of a board or a shelf, a glass vitrine or a multi media wall construction in example as television boards called ‘Wohnwand’ [Living Wall] – high definition glossy materials, cheaply (easily) produced, lighted to shine.

The physical links are accompanied by a digital catalog showing over 600 global products and surrogates you can buy in every imaginable version or materialization; in different sizes, different dimensions, as physical objects, their photographed and printed image (tattoo/idol) or the immaterial raster graphic of that image, each with their own value and advantage, signed or framed, ect. There is the feature of buying the permission to link the set thought line monitored by the artist as an add.

Those physical links, like Folding Screen [Display #9.Triptych] in Delia Jürgens. Untrodden Areas – Chrome at Künstlerhaus Meinersen or Die Geschichte der Entstehung der Welt [The history of the genesis of the world] – Selfportrait at Kunstverein Hanover, are presented through a chosen line of the collected products that can be monitored differently. Dealing with the question of repetition and changement in an infinite spiral, they are displayed in relation to the situation. They can be rearranged or as you say ‘reused’ with the back thought about the impact of digital life where nothing will ever be thrown into trash. Trash once was leftovers or a by-product of the production. Now as it has been transferred into the design of our computers, you are given the opportunity to recover the trashed data. A once made decision can easily be remade or even revoked, including the acceptance about changement. Everything is just for a specific moment. Data is permanently monitored by sensors installed in all of our smart device life, collecting facts to create the best ecological footprint archiving our statistical future. The future thus becomes the power of influencing and forming our presence, our contemporary identity that in turn influences and forms our future. Our footprints, our leftovers, our contemporary identity and values thus manifest the future while the future manipulates, writes and manifests the footprint and left overs through stereotyped statistics itself. Contemporary life thus is already programmed through filters of efficiency. A uniform pre-coded life where thinking in the meaning of reflection dies and coexists in uniform filtered dead ends only. That is very interesting due to global atmosphere or global warming circumstances, due to our lives. While human life seems to die through robotic data files, those robotic data collections seem to maintain the biosphere to make human life possible. In this sense filters become very interesting and important. We already have factional filters that maintain our fossil resources. What we need besides that are personal filters that might follow emotions and senses instead, that maintain our sensitivity of seeing and becoming aware, that evoke a provocative and irritating reaction to create the resistance of thinking, a reflection that thus give birth to changements about social commitments and limited horizons like race, gender, tradition and origin, that avoid that we become victims of an empowered elite that controls the censorship of the common filters programming rationality instead of emphasis.

SK: What part do the titles play in your works? Do they have a specific function or role for you? A kind of layer they are adding?

DJ: The titles in general are a very centered main fact in my work. The whole materialization and its contents shift and reshape through them. It’s the main statement of each work in interaction with the materials. Quite often they function as a hint for the different frames or as you called it, layers, and are opening the discussion about the layered materials, their references, their notable information and their shifting focus as well as their meaning. Like the three works in Bawarih Rift – Part I (Viscous Pixels) at Kunstverein Langenhagen: Chakra I (Double Helix – Whatever I try, pink turns out), Chakra II (Double Helix – I’m a Filter) and Chakra III (Double Helix – You can close me). Chakra is the name of the sleeping bag, the sleeping bag is quilted by two double helices each, each work is personalized with a statement of mine, the whole statement-line interfering with the set global mass products and materials of each as well as the three works among themselves interfering and opening a dialog through the statements, the titles.

The titles also edge the frame of each work/exhibition part. The exhibition at Künstlerhaus Meinersen for instance is called Untrodden Areas. That’s the main frame, the whole show, which is then splitted into four main parts: Cloud Storage (Lower gallery), The Vertical is about the Desire to move – to escape (Lobby), We live at the Bottom of an Ocean of Air (Studio) and Chrome (Upper Gallery). These four main situations are splitted into single works with their titles, too, as well as the single works are by layers of processed materials and pure materials with their barcodes. Probably you can label it as a kind of zooming process. Near and far appeals of the works change in their materialized surfaces. Like seduction of something far can be dissolved into something dry by zooming in or that a (close) material evokes the wish of touching to make out or to prove the material it pretends to be. Appearances are pretenses, so what’s for real?

Every moment becomes quickly powdery, truth and origin can be found in a blur, a constant shift when one moment fades into the other fluidly.

SK: The different layers of materials seem to be familiar from everyday life situations, on the one hand things that we are surrounded by like different building materials, materials with a clear function, as well as objects of our globalized mass culture such as hair extensions, fake nails, phone cases, gum or instant food. On the other hand there are lots of references to images and structures from the digital world and links to stock imagery. I’d like to know more about the process of generating your imagery. How would you describe the materials and content you are working with? What different layers of symbols or symbols are you using and how do you choose them? Why did you decide to use stock imagery and to integrate it into your work?

DJ: I like wandering through cities, physically or virtually, observing and absorbing things. Both give me a feeling of being flooded.

Randomly I bring some things home or to the studio, sometimes first home and later to the studio, sometimes the other way around… I store my thoughts in a mix of images I find online and notes I text in different noting programs as well as in sketch books.. combining and layering them, transforming their meaning, reference or symbol through the shape of the other. There is no difference between a virtual found material and one in daily life or even text. It’s like symbols, kinda icons or labels with a specific meaning or symbol how it’s understood or seen generally. Quite often I spot something and see something different in them than most people I talk to do, so I’m using them in a different way. I focus on the main motif they are representing, flattening them spatially that they become surfaces – Horizontal and vertical flats of layered and transmitted information that suggest room in the sense of body. Body thus becomes absent material imagined through its flat shell of transformed information, being scaled by matter.

Jonny Coleman created a very nice metaphor when he blended an ocean into a freeway in his text to my work. Both are waving processes of stream dynamics. Both stand for such different things with the highest distance but in the way of their function they are similar. There is also a Zen quote that says:

‘If we try to block a stream or resist it, it will simply go around without a pause, it will find its own way. This way is like a fallen leaf moving along a stream. If you allow the stream to carry you, its strength becomes yours.’

Maybe I would describe my working process like such a stream, in the same minute you accept this natural stream the association of mainstream, a regulated constructed system pops up in my mind, totally different but totally the same. So I combine or layer one on the other, visualizing both shapes, transforming them or leaving them the easy way and opening this dialog about the discrepancy through the title. Things are how they are. Even if they aren’t how they are, how they are described, how they are expected to be. Like water – water is expected to be blue. It is blue even if it’s transparent too, or just reflecting if you wanna be concrete. I’m thinking about the origin of things, its influences and who influences identity. How subtle and deep those influences occur.

I like that stock imagery feels pretty natural even if it is the most fabricated image you can find probably. I like the discrepancy of being the most anonymous image while approaching the most personal and intimate emotions. It becomes naturally in that way through hyper fake or hyper realism. Many stock images are made to evoke a very specific feeling or bodily reaction. I try to uncover that by deconstructing the image by converting the references, their labels and the title through different connotations and give or set a rational portrait of stranded moments.

SK: Which are the let’s say “categories”, in which you are organizing your works? How would you describe or differentiate them? What happens through the layering of the different materials?

DJ: There are objects of everyday life – building materials: to build a home, to decorate a home or to extend, feel or vitalize a body with a very clear and direct function – next to images from the web that are showing the same image information and are working in a way of a decal of these products or the feelings they evoke or are expected to evoke, next to visualized dream symbols and natural elements and spheres such as water, desert, stones or their artificial decals as crystallized PE ice pickles i.e.. Most of the objects are labeled by a barcode or by a watermark of the stock image agency showing their origin. Some are already layered online so you have a stock image of a case using a stock image of a mineral or a flower. By overlying the product’s information their meaning or function gets blurry – one product fades into the other: A case becomes a carrier of a flower, the flower becomes the surface of a case – A surface can be a skin. By that informational statement the flower already became a case, the whole object a display stating a flower as a case. Products and things in general are blurred into each other, they are losing their function and become senseless in a way even they are filled with sense. Being only the decal or tattoo or fossil and function as a kind of application, a constructive ornament, of the original, they become a souvenir or a reminder of the single parts in one body. Decoration with deepness. The work Desert [Display #5. Kimono] works like that, a deconstructed stock image of a desert printed on satin between aluminum clip rails over a bamboo bar – a desert becomes satin, the functional aspect to be stuck between clip rails or aluminum becomes a kimono as well as the whole display of that materialization (process) is put on the level of a kimono with a barcode linked to the bamboo stab. A dry sand particle interwoven in ripples as waves stuck between clips, pulled over a bamboo bar as a kimono tradition. Aspects of information that crystallize for a moment to dissolve in the next.

I’m interested in things that are surfaces or covers, that pretend to be something else than they are or things that do something with the human surface, the skin – like masking it, recovering it, decorating it or just hiding it. It’s about the question of a hidden information that exists and that is way deeper than it seems to be.

SK: Marcus’s alphabet is like a collection of snapshots of different associations and moments in relation to your work, it also refers to an openness which seems to be important and implicit for your works…

DJ: I guess thoughts about momentary in a sense of truth can be found in all of my works. One example I worked on recently is Filters, a haiku series as a calendar I made during my recent artist in residence program in the countryside. I was fascinated by the changing horizons I haven’t seen and wasn’t able to observe that intensely in a while. Horizons is seen as a kind of functional blurry immaterial layer embodying deepness and distance as well as perspective or the lack of perspective, also in a cognitive way. Landscape as a wandering process. So I wrote a haiku for every month of my stay and combined it with one of my phone photos of that month which I overlayed by standardized social media filters such as Instagram. A haiku is a humorous tercet about a moment, describing the actual situation and evoking emotion over the formal and rational openness of its text. Adding my personal photos overlayed by an Instagram filter, a social media platform people are using to show and share moments of their daily lives, maybe to collect them as memories too, Idk… I’m fascinated by the fact that many people are using those media to feel those moments more intensely through sharing it in public. Like becoming more real, more adventurous over its isolated stigmata of a photo, cut in a fitting square and being alienated through filters. Or exactly the other way around, to aware the abstraction and ultra realness by mentioning #nofilter. Socializing isolated moments through commenting on each other’s posts wordly. Extending that moment timely through the post and the possibility of communicating it.

SK: It’s interesting that you are mentioning the aspect of social media platforms – platforms which function also as a digital network – for the catalog you chose not only to integrate texts, but also music tracks as part of the physical presentation of your work – How comes? Which role does the network play for you? How does it influence your work?

Would you say that there are parallels between creating a new materialization in space and composing a song?

DJ: I invited 4gotten Morb to release some of his tracks in my catalog on which he worked at the same time I made my recent works. I liked his songs from the first minute on, seeing something relational to my works – layers that create a kind of sensual visuality. Generally, I prefer parallel texts, texts that are art pieces by themselves as a descriptive text never can hit truth like an artistic language could, visually or with sound or even text. So I was wondering about the kind of framework of other artists I could add in the catalog to avoid a direct text about my work but to open and still show the different levels of my work.

I immediately was thinking about 4gotten Morb’s tracks, that are spherical and evoke a clear but also blurred emotion in different layers of ambiguous meanings, and Marcus’ texts, whose formal language I like. A very precise pointed state that becomes emotional over an invisible layer. I guess I like subtle things. Maybe that’s why I liked the idea of using a catalog as a networking structure by itself and invited people to get in contact kinda under cover. I invited Jack’Ie Lo and Jean-Luc Unger to work together with 4gotten Morb. Finally the collaboration didn’t work out and 4Gotten Morb decided to write a soundtrack to my recent body of work: Imbeciles Notebook to Untrodden Areas. But what stays is the idea to break a proper function, to play around with general expectations and provoke an irritation or a friction. I think friction or a break is the only way to rethink and to reflect that general commodities can be renewed.

Quite often I’m thinking about what the easiest and most direct way to communicate would be. I’m thinking about a singer who’s just using her own voice, being able to create a very strong connection and giving a very direct perspective on life, without any load – a very momentary and easy way to state things without a material ad. I like the idea of a pop song in this context – a song that is heard by people all over the world with different cultural backgrounds, different nationality, different gender, all listening to the same song singing the same lyrics… something uniting in the mainstream of pop music. I prefer music to art in this context, that it feels way more direct than fine arts, direct in the way of no load or material… though I like the absence of a body in fine arts.. A leftover, a left materialized trace or remain representing a thought in the absence of a person, evoking something through its absence, through nothingness while being pure material – hyper presence. The contradiction it is making up on the one side but also the openness through absence of a one and only person who’s Individuum dominates and thus manipulates and rules the whole situation on the other side. I guess that hits my idea what life might be. Like a kind of statistic that a statement of 100 people comes closer to truth than a one and only person can come. Even one person can give a clearer and more focused view on the 100 persons’ statement to become truthful.

Since the very beginning my works function as a kind of stage. Vertical and horizontal flats that display relicts of the body. I invite or integrate music exactly because of the idea pop music or music in general evokes or has. The staged fragments, displays of surfaces with shaped or hidden cores, function as a backdrop, displaying the remains of a body while presenting its cultural or daily life relicts in flat screens… something that isn’t there, that is set in vertical and horizontal panels affecting space matterley, being filled with a spherical unifying moment.

My idea about the collaboration was that about a pop song, an exhibition of my art and a release party of 4gotten Morb’s EP, just that the exhibition platform was a catalog and the party a moment in solitude where you can listen to the soundtrack online while being bodily absent. In the idea of independence and independent communities to censor own censorships, to question and criticize general commitments. I just founded the work DIS-PLAY.

DIS-PLAY is an external monitor, which can be shown in three different versions: on the facade of a (shopping) store/mall in the city center as an oversized billboard with a goddess Sphinx character divinely ‘above’ the city; As a stand-alone display on the level of the passers-by, which directly eye-to-eye meet a mirror / portrait in oversize; or as a surface in a department store/mall window. Usually used for advertising purposes, it presents a permanent digital presence, a steady stream, interlaced with a hybrid studio, which shows live images in the everyday urban upheaval as well as in nightly solitude possibly from the opposite part of the world and its actual time. As an encounter beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries it continues my ideas from the work urinvited.net that I initiated in 2012.

Display is the negation of the automated play: dis (= not) – play (=enact) and refers to the Nordic mythology. Quite different from what was initially expected, DIS-PLAY is nothing on which something is represented or imaged, but the negation of this automated playback. It is even the activity or the being of a Disen-Wesen, an unspecified, surreal female being. The feed is not separable from the display, both do not work without the other. Thus the title already indicates the ambiguity, which is in everything. A constant stream, a news feed, a digital formative installation in the character of my media-comprehensive work is showing digital work interacting with live streamed physical work: collages, photos, texts and video clips as a cohesion of still images, running feed and intermixed images, links to social media platforms as well as slideshows. Thematically changing chapters present the studio-life, the studio-production and -inspiration in their post-stage as well as in their traditional manner show. Digital works in exchange with the reproduction of physical works, exhibition situations as well as clips of quoted texts from thematically relevant on the Internet available talks are compiled and played in a digital conglomerate. A constantly evolving crystallization, which represents a mirror image, a reflection panel, as opposed to the consorquious movements in the human current of the inner city, and offers a moment of pause and reflection, the moment of the studio, while creating a life image.

DIS-PLAY is a format that leaves the art product in its actual hybrid form, in which inspiration, artistic work, life and materialized form of artistic thought interweave. It is the interactive, artistic discourse and process rather than its image, its representation, or even its archiving.

In addition to the main component, the virtual showroom, DIS-PLAY is also pursuing further exhibition formats with the aim of a political contemporary statement and its distribution as a publication page in the form of a publisher:

Life is for sharing.

Catalogs

NOCTURNE IN DAYLIGHT – IN SEVEN MOVEMENTS –

UNTRODDEN AREAS

DIS-PLAY