On the Wings of Estrangement
This title carries many layers and meanings for me just as the word estrangement it self is multifaceted.
When I walk through the city as a photographer and observe, a childlike curiosity accompanies me. Between walls and people, between trees and stones, under bridges and across meadows this curiosity embraces me and becomes my companion.
When I look at forms and moments from a distance, I search for an instant that will never repeat itself. Like a group of people at a red traffic light each one a universe full of stories. In such moments I become the stranger who experiences estrangement; a feeling that sometimes appears minimalist, sometimes as colorless melancholy, and sometimes as a critical gaze. All of this transforms my immediate relationship with the environment into an image.
Every corner of the city resembles a theatre stage to me: a composition of light, scenery, voices, actors and narratives. Sometimes these very scenes form the basis of estrangement like a flight over the city, a passage through time that detaches me from my surroundings while granting me a sharply critical perspective.
This feeling of estrangement has always been with me and remains even where the sense of home exists at the same time. Everyday life, loneliness, silence and helplessness all find a melancholic expression in this exhibition.
It is only a flight, a passage a sharing of forms and emotions that are always in motion, have been and will be, yet never repeat themselves.
This exhibition is an excerpt from a larger body of work: my photographic wandering in Bonn. A search for estrangement within the familiar, for discovering the self among the known and a movement within the grey area in between.
