Title: Diagnosed with phantom pain (ongoing)

Text: Under the surface of the superficial are significant issues which touch every part of our lives. They are affecting our perception in any possible way, from school education to our health care system. Sometimes they can cause enormous damage, like depression, or in my case, depression procures by structures and norms our society believes in, like hot water that heats up until you burn your skin. Some call it hysteria or manifest it as craziness. Problematic is the social meaning that we ascribe to the human body, which is rooted as an intended failure or, in other words, the horse‘s mouth of gender. As men don‘t have female bodies, they skip the fact that women, or people who identify themselves as female, stumble upon other problems in daily life. We live our lives like defective male beings because our differences are ignored and converted into gender-neutral. Unasked, we have to face unequal payment, sexual harassment, male violence, unpaid workload and still have to act like little princesses. We can call it discrimination against women supported through education and socialisation. It is weird to grow older and realise what your mother has been through after a specific time, the façade of the perfect life begins to crack, and the crumbling plaster reveals the broken foundation. They say: don‘t look too deeply into things, or you will look backwards. It feels like I am looking at myself apart from my body and judging whether I am behaving correctly. The photograph serves as a marker to show me where I was and how I moved on. It is about the process of therapy and healing and gives me a safe space to speak out my silence when in moments, I lose my voice. A silence that is coming out of my experience of growing up to be or become a better woman.

Title: After fertilisation

Text: To exist, yet to be unable to create. Composed differently to be the last of its kind. Objectively a miracle, it is a bastard in the vernacular. A deviation that has emerged from different species' procreation; a defective material arises from the joining of affective processes. A titular hybrid, but more likely a dead end of evolution. The performance of the sexual act is not impossible, though the urge is weak. Males are always infertile, but fertility is an occasional occurrence for the feminine. The dowry of the mother predominates. The hybrid: nature's ultimate artwork. Not the standard, yet possible. The predominant hereditary traits show the origin, but they appear stunted. Cognitively more capable than its parents, yet unable to reproduce. Denying is pointless. It is what it is. The body is for labor, but no labor of love. Able to withstand the yoke of its purpose. However uncommon, it is obliged to do its part ahead of death - with the duty to die at the end. - In cooperation with The Natural History Museum of Denmark & Westphalian Museum of Natural History.

Title: The burden of success

Text: Humanity is taught to be megalomanic; impatience is a result. Starting in childhood, the burden of success resonates in the cradle. Failure as shame. What remains? What is left? Something enormous? Something breathtaking? Or just dusty photographs, threatening to fade? Important- be of importance. Who dictates the evaluation of our lives? Am I significant? Or just a feather in the wind? Nice to look at but insignificant. Just as unimportant as short-lived. We build towers full of longing and desire at our foundations. But often our inadequacies predominate and with the strength remaining one tries to sustain the creative urge. Failure, the constant companion, diverts such concerns. An act of balance. Cadaver on cadaver, we stack fragile towers to ensure that long-failed ideals ultimately are not lost. Such that exist only in our thoughts. The system is shaky and brittle. Building something new from this - borders on megalomania. We have seen it - and now the inescapable scandal. The tower falls beneath its own weight.

Title: What's left is an empty room

Text: We develop solid structures in our lives, something to hold on to. Rooms to protect us; solid rooms to furnish with tables and chairs which help us to feel stable. Despite this, we still search for something else, something to help us feel truly at home. Something which won’t break or go away; a constant. This room exists outside of any reality, and for a moment, everything else is meaningless. The room is immune to all external influence. This is an exploration of openness and intimacy between two people: to be naked despite clothes, and dressed up even when wearing nothing at all. To be aware that nothing is exactly how it used to be. All that matters here are the two human beings present and their story - how she sees him, and how he sees her - although our perspective was shaped by one of them, with the shutter release in her hand. To return to life as an individual, to go your own way and exist just for yourself. No longer to know what the other is thinking. But before this separation, the two sit opposite to each other one last time. One last talk, but some words remain untold - unrealized potential. What has changed; what went wrong? Acceptance through uncertainty. Only the feeling that there used to be something there is left. Any attempt to ignore the accumulated emotions, and pretend for a moment that things are now once more as they used to be, is met with silence. It is not the solution and you know you have to give up. You give it away. And after all, the decision is made: “We are done”.

Title: Destiny of a white horse

Text: In German, a white horse is referred to as a “Schimmel”, implying something which is full of mildew or rot. Many white horses become afflicted with equine melanoma and often die from the disease. Initially unnoticed within, the cancer in its final stages of malignance reveals itself in the orifices of the animal. Aesthetic beauty is an amalgamation of subjective values and forms which are pleasing to the senses. The photographs suggest a relationship between death and beauty. When a fetid body is rendered beautiful, wherein lies the repulsiveness? At the center of these photographs, the Schimmel is as a metaphor for quotidian paradox; from the realm of personal affairs to broader considerations of contemporary society and coaxial allegories of mortality.

Title: When it hurts to become

Text: What does it mean to be a woman? The term woman does not solely refer to biological terms only it rather describes a role that an individual is being forced into. Accustoming to the female gender role is a complicated act - a never ending burden even. Women are confronted with many hardships throughout their lives, among them physical and psychological. Themes of pregnancy, adolescence or the stress of caring seem to be omnipresent. Does it come as a huge surprise that women are more likely to suffer when many of those issues can be seen as the root cause of their dejection. Is the existence of gendered depression unremarkable?