Ist das etwa Kunst?
Video installation
2025-2026
The installation is part of an ongoing project titled "Ist das etwa Kunst?" ("Is this supposed to be art?").
This video installation continues and expands the conceptual framework initiated in "Ist das etwa Kunst?". The project brings together a large and diverse group of participants from different nationalities, cultures, languages, ages, and backgrounds, all posing the same simple yet charged question: "Is this supposed to be art?"
By collecting this question from many voices around the world, the work transforms a singular inquiry into a shared global reflection. Repeated in different languages and accents, the question highlights a growing uncertainty about the direction of contemporary art and the systems that define its value.
The project critically examines today's art ecosystem, where commercial galleries, museums, and market-driven institutions increasingly dominate visibility, validation, and legitimacy. Within this context, artistic value is often shaped less by critical engagement or aesthetic inquiry and more by branding, spectacle, and economic positioning.
Rather than offering answers, the installation intentionally keeps the question open as a discursive space. Participants are not performers in a scripted work, but contributors to a collective interrogation that reflects a broader cultural unease. Where is contemporary art heading? Who defines its meaning and worth? At what point does art begin to merely simulate itself?
The work takes physical form through three small television screens placed directly on the floor of the exhibition space, with a single luminous white square mounted on the wall above them. Each screen carries its own image, and together they build the language of the installation.
Information overload, 2026
Mixed media: acrylic on canvas
150 x 150 cm (59.06 x 59.06 inches)
The first screen shows an eye, looped and unblinking. The eye is the measure of other lives, other opinions, other versions of happiness. It is not Big Brother. The eye is all of us, watching one another, weighing one another against one another.
The second screen carries the voices of more than eighty people, each asking the question. They stand in for an inner confusion, a quiet dissatisfaction, a not-understanding that most of us learn to hide, because we know our surroundings will judge us the moment we admit it out loud.
The third screen shows teeth. Teeth as the symbol of courage. Of saying what you think. Of refusing to be afraid.
Above all of this hangs the white, luminous square, a direct reference to Malevich's White on White, and the moment when the painting declared its own ending. Here it functions as a provocation. It occupies the place where a painting is expected to be, and offers nothing in its place. The viewer is left standing before an absence, and the absence asks the same question the voices ask: Is this supposed to be art?
The accumulation of voices and images does not seek consensus. It emphasizes plurality, contradiction, and tension. In this way, the question "Is this supposed to be art?" is reframed not as skepticism or rejection, but as a necessary and urgent act of critical awareness.
