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.

CCA Berlin, 2023

Dazeland
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

With Young Valley Soil: Crossings of O
2020
Mixed media

Crossings of O is created in a dialogue between the artist Helena Müller and the Young Valley Soil-collective.

“While the Young Valley Soil collective asks us to form an “O” with our mouths, Helena Müller invites us on a steam tour after sunset. In their showcase exhibitions, the artists enter into a dialogue about processes of visualization: of gender stereotypes, coded meanings, and the coincidental permanence of interpersonal encounters or of alliances with one another. The glass panes of the showcases are of special importance here: the artists resist their spatial limitations, using both their interior and their exterior. They expand them audibly, but also performatively, as mediators of revealing and concealing. This is a beginning.”

Anette Hans, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof

Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, 2020