Pours, 1998

Info

My first experiments with pouring date to 1998, when I was a student at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK). They were connected to a question that preoccupied us in the class led by Ulrike Grossarth: How do humans relate to the objects around them? For the pouring experiments, each student brought a selection of objects to class. The practicalities of execution and the conscious act of handling the objects made us aware of our own actions. This collaborative work subsequently inspired my own experiments with pouring.

For these, I placed between five and twenty mundane objects, such as a metal bracket, a pencil, and a screwdriver, inside a bag that I then emptied over a table. I recorded the resulting random configurations of objects in photographs before rearranging them on the table in accordance with my personal and intuitive sense of order. I was interested in the contrast between the two arrangements, the random, intuitive one, and the “corrected,” objective one. Later on, between 2002 and 2004, I expanded on these pieces by inviting artist friends to make collaborative pours. Together, we developed rules of the game on how to handle and place the objects. I returned to the pouring experiments in 2007, now in order to connect them to ideas and questions of urban design.

1998

Performative exercise of pouring two identical sets of objects from two bags

Mass-produced everyday items: polishing wheels, charcoal pencils, hairpins, fishing baits, plastic fishes, coins, packs of paper tissues, metal brackets

Dimensions variable, depending on action