78 inch to 78 inch, acrylic on polyester, 2023

Performance
Artistic Field Constituted from Stereotypes

The works exhibited in Cambridge are created in response to a film experience. They refer to the British
cult film Performance (1968). In the fall of 2022, the film was shown at a festival in Hamburg, and the
program included various feminist films. Many of the guests were feminists. We were confronted with
formerly-familiar, very violent cis-male read patterns, male fantasies, but then followed by queer and
beautiful, sensual scenes. Many of us were unsettled. Incendiary images, beat images - sensations.
"Sensation" was also what the Young British Generation of the 90s called themselves.
Today, the word sensation could also be used to describe many of the images of the current and
hybrid Ukraine war that have been shaping our everyday, mostly virtual, visual experience for the past
year.
We are forced to deal more strongly with aspects that did not affect us so directly in the past because
they were not so present. This can be both a danger and a potential.
The abstract narratives in the paintings in the exhibition in Cambridge are constituted by
stereotypes and at the same time blur the too unbearable patterns that transport the past into the
present.
In my artistic reflections I connect the ambivalent impressions from the film Performance, the artist
movement "Sensation" perceived from Germany and the media, sensational images of the present of
the war as a "painterly performance".