Private Property {
  The Project;
} //2003-2006

A series of photographs, packaged as images within images, present themselves as contemporary still-lives of the artist’s private - and to a degree intimate – ambience. Formally and contextually related to the traditional pictorial genres, these closely crowded and in many cases overloaded images display the dubious achievements of contemporary consumer society. Imaginary microcosms are constructed somewhere between kitsch, curios, and consumption, ones reminiscent of those cabinets of curiosities from times long past. Appearing again and again alongside foodstuffs, cosmetics, and electrical appliances are medial citations and indirect references to art in the form of photographs, newspaper articles, and books.
An additional form of associative, artistic commentary is comprised by the two-sided reproductions of t-shirts. These are occupied in an exemplary manner by the body of the artist, and are provided alternately with texts or images referring, once again, to passages, individuals, or citations appearing in the texts. The t-shirt, familiar as a bearer of messages, also alludes indirectly to the person that wears it. In the process, an additional space is constructed, a further level is opened up, one that grants readers a space for their own thoughts.
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty once asserted that the human being is not simply in space, but is instead inherent to it. How, then, do we move within these “four walls”? How is this abode to be inhabited at all? The roof of an artist always accommodates special guests, for to inhabit it is like inhabiting a laboratory or a workshop, where attention is focused on the Other…

Alexandra Kolossa