About
FACEANDBOOK.ME / Art campaign by Kerstin Weichsel, conceptual artist
A Chronicle of the Other Perspective—What important decisions are being taken how?, and how are the most urgent questions of our time being negotiated? The full program. Political controversies, “progress”, history, a culture of remembrance, gender …
Knowing about the preposterousness and at the same time about the end of the high time of warnings, heard or unheard; the legend of the spirit willing and the flesh that is far too weak. The well-known math theory of sets, unperturbed and succeeding in the field of collective taboo and repression, and allowed to continue building its seemingly optimistic dream worlds. It is precisely this situation I’m exposing myself to.
The amount of what I register requires the form of a chronicle. It is not so much a decoding of things but rather a process. So I offer to take part in my establishing a working method, an “esthetics of bewilderment”—FACEANDBOOK.ME. This is my virtual and my factual business. A kind of negation of the negation appears which makes direct contact with the high-gloss dream world subjects of those advertising icons and highlights who like to pose as much as to poke. And it is this very demonstration that points out the costs for what we accept and go along with, what we consume until in the end it consumes us. The huge dimensions, the ungraspable volumes are celebrating their influence, whether or not this is perceptible.
What a miscalculation to think we could disregard our own judgment without any downside. The visual flood all over requires at least the effort of active ignoring, closing our eyes. And this effort remains forever unrequited.
I see myself as an artist who wants to make these things appreciated in a sensual way. I produce art that one cannot understand correctly or wrongly in the first place. Watching what’s there, in the light of past and present challenges, this moment of surprise, of puzzlement, of just being bewildered at the sight of my photo series and installations, might be a suitable impulse for looking closer after all. As hopeful as much as it is laconic.
I present artificial strategies that collide or play with all kinds of energies I meet: everyday life, elite culture, environmental destruction, overpopulation … along with profoundly comic or tragic elements of my voyeuristic glimpses. I propose an unstatic, communicative art that forms itself far away from established categories, and all the time anew. FACEANDBOOK.ME has the property of founding a new social community: full of virtuosity, practically and virtually. Another perspective—FACEANDBOOK.ME
CONTACT: kerstin@faceandbook.me www.KerstinWeichsel.com
The artist Kerstin Weichsel lives in Berlin. She is a member of BBK-Berlin
Commentary: Petra Hornung / Texts: Kerstin Weichsel / Translations: Werner Richter