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ENCOUNTERS
2023
Archival pigment prints
160 × 106.7 cm each


The impact of human activities on nature in the period of the Anthropocene generates an intertwined world in which art has become an anthropology of global life, connecting humans and nonhumans. Therefore, today’s anthropology can no longer be centered on the human species. Already back in the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss saw its ultimate goal in the “dissolution” of the human figure. Acknowledging the end of the classical Western division between nature and culture, Encounters is going beyond the human species as such by reintegrating culture into nature: A number of minimalistic black-and-white painted objects were put among wild monkeys. In the photographies, the viewer can see how they cautiously approach the objects and, also, how they immediately and instinctively take possession of the works. In this encounter of multiple coexistences in a shared ecosystem, art no longer occupies a dominant symbolic position: a trace among traces, an activity nourished by multiple parallel activities, an object within a world of objects. The work(s) of art no longer enjoy(s) a special status: The human subject has lost its monopoly on the gaze. The aesthetic moment is thus not an act of transcendence, but of participation in an ongoing ephemeral material flux: Art becomes a fleeting gesture within a continuum far larger than itself—a momentary shimmer of awareness in the vast temporality of nature.




︎ Archive Photography