Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Hi, I am Kurt, I work as an artist and as a carpenter. I live in Berlin.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?
In April I graduated from art school in Berlin. I did a very personal exhibition consisting of 2 large installations, a video piece and a text. In the latter, I talk about my father, who had brain cancer, lost his memory and eventually died. And I talk about my mother having to deal with all of this. Everything in the show was borrowed from my parents’ house, which was sold shortly after the show. Working with objects, practices, and memories directly from my upbringing felt necessary at this point. I think I will continue to work on this for a while while allowing myself to combine this energy/atmosphere with what is happening around me at the moment.
https://rundgang.io/map?city=berlin&page=home
At the moment my friend Bryony Dawson and I are working on an exhibition in my room, which is sometimes a project space, called Buzzer Reeves. I took over the room from Bryony, so we have both been living here and calling it home for some time. We started to have a conversation about what that sense of home actually defines. What’s left when it’s not tied to a specific place? Maybe it’s tied to certain objects, rituals, people? Memories? I have sometimes thought that a place becomes home when you have felt shitty there (like sick, hangover, or heartbroken) and have been comforted by its warmth. I am going to show a movie we made together at night in my rather empty childhood home, using my father’s flashlight. We are also writing a kind of fairy tale that we will bind and publish in the context of the exhibition.
In June, I have a show with my friend Edgar Lessig in Guelph, Canada, in a space called Stadium Projects. And I will be showing some work at sangheeut in Seoul – also in June.
And then there might be another show with Joshua too in 2025 🙂
What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?
A big challenge is the housing situation, which of course affects everyone in the cities. Rents are getting higher and higher. It’s hard to find (affordable) apartments/rooms/studios.
Also, cultural funding in Germany has been cut drastically, which means that independent art spaces and initiatives are struggling to survive, and there are fewer grants and project funding for artists.
I think another challenge is that there is so much art these days that is consumed super fast. All this very instagrammable art that we see every day – I think it shapes our perception a lot and ends up creating a kind of resistance. I actually think that this overabundance makes art more boring, while it increases the feeling of competition.
You work alongside Joshua often enough to consider this collaboration a whole new perspective as if it could be coming from a combined individual. Do you find this to be true?
Yes, we have considered that. It feels a bit like the work has its own will and identity and we just feed it with ideas from time to time.
How does collaboration play a part in your practice? Do you think this operates similarly in your individual work?
I think for me, collaboration is even present in my individual work to some degree. When I work with found objects, I collaborate with the people who left them somewhere (like in the case of my graduation show: my parents and their dog), or when I photograph something, it definitely feels like whatever is happening in the frame is shaped by other people whose traces I am capturing.
But of course – when you actively collaborate with someone, it is a different thing: when impulses, ideas, doubts of another person influence the work. Sometimes the other person has such a good idea that you just go for it, or you really dislike what they want to do. It may sound corny, but it is a bit like a dance.
Do you conjure a narrative when making certain pieces?
Yes. Mostly our process develops from looking at the objects we find. When we work together, we often take long walks and talk about all sorts of things. Sometimes we find good things along the way: on the street or in thrift stores. Or someone might find something great on eBay. If these things stick with us, we try to figure out what it is that fascinates us here, and (sometimes long after a work has been developed and shown) we understand how this particular piece is connected to what we have done before. I can definitely see ongoing narratives in the work we have done over the last five years, even though it is nothing that we have ever really planned. Certain motifs just keep coming back.
How has your work evolved over time and how did you start working together?
We actually met before art school, both in the application process. Joshua for painting and me for sculpture (we both ended up studying sculpture). Basically, we hung out a lot and made collages together, listened to music, watched movies, and helped each other with individual projects. At some point it just made sense to do these projects together, since we were so influenced by each other anyway. In the early years of art school we were so chaotic. We wanted to be like Isa Genzken: glue all kinds of things together and spray paint them. It was fun!
Later, we enjoyed discovering different approaches to making art, both aesthetically and in terms of process. We began to be very interested in the spaces in which we exhibited. The space became as much a material as the objects we would show in it, while we found that the objects themselves had spatial inscriptions that we would also incorporate into the show. Artists like Michael Asher, Gordon Matta-Clark, or Laurie Parsons became important to us.
What was the last show you saw that stuck out to you?
THEATER by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Fluentum, Berlin
And the Tolia Astakhishvili show at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin is still on my mind.
What are you really excited about right now?
When the sun comes out in Berlin.
Interview conducted and edited by Liam Swings