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Photography is a media which allows me to construct mind maps. Or even to draw a map of the world I live in. It allows me to make a retranscription of feelings and connections, which are not necessarily superficially visible, in between things, people, ideas.
I am not searching for an artificial esthetisation of reality banned into the rectangular format of a photography. I believe that this is a concept of the pre-digital era. There is no universal truth in pictures, no reality other than a subjective one. Most of the following pictures have been made with low cost cameras and objectives, who cares?
I think of myself as being an iconoclast. I reject the possible moment of identification of a viewer with a clichee that exists only in a 2-dimensional space (this is a mass mediatic concept), so you will not find a lot of faces, clothes or other moments of identification with people on my pictures.
Artwork.
7m2
2008. Paris. Inventory. Work in progress
Au passage II
2008. Paris. work in progress. Some of these pictures have been voluntarily staged as I consider that it does not change the outcome of the picture itself if it is "real" or staged.
Au passage I
2006. Paris. work in progress. Some of these pictures have been voluntarily staged as I consider that it does not change the outcome of the picture itself if it is "real" or staged.
For many people Paris is "the city of love". For me it is a place that suffers on the one hand from its history (centralisation of services, financial flows, population flows, work, probably a little bit inherited from Louis XIV's time's mentality and the history of the urban space itself, early modernity etc.) and on the other hand from its incapacity to adapt and to open up (conservatism, protection of private property, control mecanisms). Due to uncountable prohibitions namely concerning the freedom of movement within the city and its different spaces (for several reasons: the urbanist situation itself, but also overpopulation and private property issues) there are a lot of inhuman means that try to contain the movements of humans in invisible limitations and pre-traced and thus oppressive routes (small doors in the subways. small pavements, closing of parcs in the early evening hours, no banks, anti-homeless-installations in front of shops etc.).
This series is an effort to make visible some of the things i feel in Paris. It is called "Au passage" which means "by the way" but may also mean "passing by". Because the city it is a place of "passage", a place where one does not stay (workers go from one end to the other, thousands of people from the outskirts come only for shopping, tourists go farther) it's a place where one easily misses the details.
Paris by night
2007. Paris.
No title (furniture)
2006-2008. Berlin. The items in this Berlin backyard are permanently rearranged by the children living in the neighborhood.
No title (Der arme Poet & self portrait as Der arme Poet)
2004 & 2008. Paris. This image is a quotation of "Der arme Poet" by Carl Spitzweg. This painting of the german Biedermeier era (which hung, as probably in a lot of german homes, in my parents' living room) makes fun of the bourgeois idea of the artist who is in very poor and who has either to stay in bed because of the cold, or to heat his apartement with his own writings.
No title
2003. videostills. Zeytinburnu, Gültepe, Istanbul. Zeytinburnu and Gültepe are historical gecekondu areas in Istanbul.
These images have been exhibited in a group exhibition together with works by Marco Funke and Nicolas Moulin, in october 2005 in Betonsalon gallery, Paris, accompagnying "Illegal city", a non-real-time 3d-simulation on urban growth. The exhibition was accompagnied by the following text :
The generic city envisioned by Rem Koolhas describes the "becoming similar", the homogenization of the urban agglomeration. However, this term omits the history and self-organization of individuals re-appropriating urban space.
70% of Istanbul's buildings are built without any authorization. The phenomenon of gecekondus, shanty towns which appeared in the 1940ies, is ongoing. In these shanty towns one can observe the almost natural settlement of solid economies and tactics to cope with the everyday. The simulation "Illegal city" was made using genetic algorithms, whose development is mostly based on interviews realized with Istanbul urbanists in 2003. It creates a fiction simulating the growth of Istanbul, an agglomeration of 19 million inhabitants.
Documentary.
Tsuneko/Marianne
2005. Paris. performance of franco-japanese artist Tsuneko Taniuchi at the Grand Palais during "La force de l'art", in Paris.
Tsuneko Taniuchi/Je me marie en chinois
2005. Paris. performance of franco-japanese artist Tsuneko Taniuchi at the gallery Miss China Beauty in Paris.
