With Young Valley Soil:
Hard to Swallow
2024
Collective lecture performance
It starts with a queasy feeling. I see something I don’t have; a place I’m not in; an appearance that isn’t mine. I want it, I need it, envy gnaws at my stomach. I suppress it, don’t let it in, cover it with politeness. It builds up, resentment builds and gnaws at me. How am I supposed to digest all of this?
In the work “Hard to Swallow,” the Young Valley Soil-Collective invited guests to a performative lunch where they dedicated themselves to the manifestations of envy. The work consists of an audio piece for the journey to the performance, three on-site lecture performances, and a four-course menu - each course addressing different stages of envy: bitterness, envy, resentment, and digestion.
Hard to Swallow
2024
Collective lecture performance
It starts with a queasy feeling. I see something I don’t have; a place I’m not in; an appearance that isn’t mine. I want it, I need it, envy gnaws at my stomach. I suppress it, don’t let it in, cover it with politeness. It builds up, resentment builds and gnaws at me. How am I supposed to digest all of this?
In the work “Hard to Swallow,” the Young Valley Soil-Collective invited guests to a performative lunch where they dedicated themselves to the manifestations of envy. The work consists of an audio piece for the journey to the performance, three on-site lecture performances, and a four-course menu - each course addressing different stages of envy: bitterness, envy, resentment, and digestion.
M.1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung Hohenlockstedt (Photos: Marie-Theres Böhmker)
march hares, cuckoos, nuts
2023
Screen print on textile, bubble wrap, watch chain
200 cm x 150 cm, 30 × 42 cm
Cuckoos, March Hares, Nuts is a textile installation that uses the aesthetic strategies of the Mad Pride movements (screen printing, cut-out techniques) to reflect on forms of representation of "madness" defined by the community itself. In the works, the cuckoo serves as an analogy for the simplifying mechanisms of imagery on madness.
2023
Screen print on textile, bubble wrap, watch chain
200 cm x 150 cm, 30 × 42 cm
Cuckoos, March Hares, Nuts is a textile installation that uses the aesthetic strategies of the Mad Pride movements (screen printing, cut-out techniques) to reflect on forms of representation of "madness" defined by the community itself. In the works, the cuckoo serves as an analogy for the simplifying mechanisms of imagery on madness.
CCA Berlin, 2023
Dazeland
2022
two-channel video installation
09:01min, stereo
Link
2022
two-channel video installation
09:01min, stereo
Link
Dazeland is a work that explores water as a means of treatment and control in the history and present of European psychiatry. In the work, the element of water serves as a metaphor for discipline and power but it is also depicted as a space of resolution, transformation, and security – a state of incompleteness. The changing and fleeing water serves as an analogy for the ever-shifting nature of historical narrative: The experiences of silenced positions trespass the surface through the demonstration of stigmas and power structures.
One of the central visual elements of the work is a fountain built in front of the Charité-hospital in Berlin. The fountain is handsome, and represents civilisation, cleanliness, and mastery of nature – values that were also once espoused inside the psychiatric hospital. Simultaneously, water hosts its own ecosystems within the boundaries set by humans.
Video stills 
Frappant Galerie, 2022
wings, steps, fire
08:01min (loop)
Link by request
Wings, Steps, Fire (2021) asks questions about historical objects found in fields and forests by so-called probers. These finds are not only considered evidence of "historical" narratives, but also trophies that circulate on online forums – a form of tangible currency for the time amateur archaeologists spend searching with metal detectors. The finds are photographed and uploaded to the forums to be commented on and admired, but also for purposes of sale and resale.
The work looks at historical narratives - and the objects and photographs that carry them - as currencies, as trophies of power and as objects of desire. The result is a cacophony of contradictory narrative logics, temporalities and sensations that range from reassuring to uncomfortable, raising questions about the process that presents found objects as carriers of historical authenticity and vessels of nostalgia and projection; much like the cinematic and photographic process itself.
Curator Seda Yildiz
Installation view, Museum für Fotografie Berlin, 2021
Installation view, 8. Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, 2022
Light (Metal)
2021
Cyanotype on linen, steel
I want to sleep with your truth against my cheek
In installative works, Elina Saalfeld and Elisa Nessler wander through the tension fields of growing up and invite blurred glances at the search for the self and the other.
Saalfeld's installation Light (Metal) explores notions of authenticity, identity, and the desire to be seen. For the work, poems from pubescents collected via social media are printed on linen using the cyanotype-process and are hung on a metal framework, creating a space that makes temporality and process visible.
Design: Fiete Lauschke
Frappant Galerie, 2021