The Master's Tools
Found objects (antique Punch and Judy puppet - The Policeman), UV print on vinyl, fibreboard, wood, aerosol paint, aluminium, plexiglass.
190 x 80 x 12 cm
2025
☉
Scene from a recruitment office:
Sweating bodies moving in unison, a never-ending line in the middle of a desert of men and women who, as a means to make ends meet, have decided to become an extension of the regime. They fear the physical, sedentary as they are, out of breath as soon as the stopwatch ticks to ten. Their fears are unfounded, though; the most important skillset today is the ability to disregard the Other, to pull the trigger when instructed. Almost all pass, except for a young man born with no hands.
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Stürm / Storm
Found objects (Christmas tinsel garland), UV print on vinyl, fibreboard, wood, aluminium, plexiglass, epoxy glue.
160 x 100 x 8 cm
2025
☉
(The firebombing of Hamburg vs. The Blitz)
(Dresden vs. Desert Storm)
(Gaza vs. Hiroshima)
- Why do we condone one while looking scornfully upon the other?
- Because the victor gets to decide how history is written.
Excerpt of Disney’s script for The Lion King (1994):
Cut to a frontal shot of Pride Rock, with Mufasa and Simba sitting side by side on the summit, which is lit by the rising sun, as the music swells.
Mufasa
Look, Simba. [Cut to a back shot of Mufasa and Simba sitting side by side on the summit of Pride Rock, silhouetted by the distant rising sun.] Everything the light touches is our kingdom.
Simba
Wow.
The camera slowly begins to swivel around Mufasa and Simba to show their faces.
Mufasa
A king's time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One day, Simba, the sun will set on my time here [Cut to a frontal shot of Simba looking up at Mufasa reverently.] and will rise with you [Mufasa bends his head into frame so that he is almost at eye level with Simba.] as the new king.
Cut to a wide back shot of Mufasa and Simba sitting side by side on the summit of Pride Rock, with the entirety of the Pride Lands spread out before them and the sun rising in the distance.
Simba
And this'll all be mine?
Simba begins to stride along the edge of the summit of Pride Rock.
Mufasa
Everything.
Cut to a back shot of Simba striding along the edge of the summit of Pride Rock; the camera follows him, revealing a strangely shadowy landscape in the distance.
Simba
Everything the light touches. [Simba sits. He looks over his shoulder, in the direction of Mufasa.] What about that shadowy place?
Mufasa
[from off-screen] That's beyond our borders. [Cut to a frontal shot of Mufasa and Simba, with Mufasa approaching Simba from behind.] You must never go there, Simba.
Simba
But I thought a king can do whatever he wants.
Mufasa smiles. He turns and walks away.
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Love
Found objects (antique baseball bat), UV print on vinyl, fibreboard, wood, aluminium, plexiglass.
190 x 80 x 12 cm
2025
☉
Emotional violence, the kind where your hair’s falling out in clumps and you can’t sleep due to all the stress and you go into full-on panic mode when you hear the key in the door, where your kids are doing poorly in school because daddy liked to drink and mommy likes to take it out on you. (But he said he’s sorry!!)( He said it’s gonna be different from now on…) You’re all alone in a big city and the last time you spoke to your mother was 10 years ago. It gets lonely doesn’t it?
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160 x 100 x 8 cm
2025
☉
My body is a vessel. Full of blood, full of hope, full of medicated bliss.
My body is a vessel. Full of water, full of semen, full of love.
My body is a vessel. Full of tears, full of joy, full of fear.
My body is an object of desire.
My body is an object of hate.
My body is not yours.
My body is not mine.
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180 x 130 x 12 cm
2025
☉
Rank (definitions from Oxford Languages):
__________________________________
● a position in the hierarchy of the armed forces.
"an army officer of high rank"
● a position within the hierarchy of an organisation or society.
"only two cabinet members had held ministerial rank before"
● high social position.
"persons of rank and breeding"
● a single line of soldiers or police officers drawn up abreast.
"they were drawn up outside their barracks in long ranks"
● the people belonging to or constituting a group or class.
"the ranks of Britain's unemployed"
● give (someone or something) a rank or place within a grading system.
"students ranked the samples in order of preference"
● have a specified rank or place within a grading system.
"he now ranks third in America"
● having a foul or offensive smell.
"breathing rank air"
● very unpleasant.
"the tea at work is nice but the coffee's pretty rank"
● (especially of something bad or deficient) complete and utter (used for emphasis).
"rank stupidity"
● information retrieval:
“A majority of search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.”
● advance in an organisation by one's own efforts.
"he rose through the ranks to become managing director"
● take unfair advantage of one's seniority.
"someone pulled rank and took my place"
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160 x 100 x 8 cm
2025
☉
and-
You, hating the other because your friends tell you they do. Them, hating you for what their kin went through. Bodies and minds remember, you see, intergenerational trauma seeps through the soil like an oil spill, suffocating any living thing it covers. Political violence arises from fear and from needs not being met. Did you know that when temperatures go up instances where protests erupt become more common? No slow-boiling frogs here, we’ll be going down with a bang, baby… At some point our cognitive function will begin to decline as a result of the atmosphere heating up and us inhaling all of it, one dirty microparticle at a time. That we might get to a point in the future where our collective knowledge might become inaccessible because we’ll be too stupid to understand seems to confound most. And so I must ask: do you know that people might think you’re ludicrous for stating the above, that you’re a killjoy? Do you even care?
and-
Trickle-down economics is, in itself, a form of violence, most self-aware people know this already. Perpetrated by those maladapted weirdos (read: psychopaths) buying up posh underground bunkers and pristine plots of land in New Zealand because they know they’ll need it when it gets too hot to breathe and they’ll come knocking down fences. The ones who have conditioned you like a dog, to alter your already-meagre life for a like. The last time society had seen an improvement in their overall quality of life compared to their parents was the Boomer generation (OK, Boomer!). Since then, the rope has been gradually tightened around our necks. A game that’s been rigged all along, ever since we’ve begun playing it. Consent means coercion. Dogs will fight for the last bone. A blue pill or a red pill will not treat the underlying cause of disease, it will simply offer a welcome distraction.
and then what? :)
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134 x 180 x 20 cm
2023
☉
Andreea Anghel’s assemblage of Catherine-The-Not-So-Great disrupts the linearity of history and preexistent images. On an emotionless and emptied background, the representation of a dress worn by the Russian elite in the 1780s is punitively attached to a blond wig and an antique agrarian tool. Wrestling inside the aluminium case, the image of a headless figure of the Russian colonial violence is now impaled by one of the working tools of repressed agrarian peasants. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯Text by Cristina Vasilescu and Maria Persu
Whether it is power over their own bodies or the power to lead societies, ultimately female power has been mistrusted by men, and in turn sometimes also by other women while operating in a male society. Take Catherine the second of Russia, as Andreea Anghel does in her Catherine-the-not-so-Great and consider the reactions her power inspired. Her actions and attitudes that we find most unfavourable today are still aligned with her male peers and yet as a woman she is judged differently. From Boudica to Thatcher, perhaps this is not real female power after all but woman forced to play the games and masquerade of a patriarch – albeit to notable effect. Perhaps female power at its best is not interested in singular recognition or in nation states and therefore often remains unrecognised. While all this has held our attention, with how much wisdom and skill have other unsung women held together families, tribes and societies without ever drawing blood?
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33 x 72 x 32 cm
2023
☉
Ladies and Gentlemen, it will only get worse from here!
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125 x 180 x 16 cm
2023
☉
From Wikipedia:
The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:
‘If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.’
Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film. Later in the film, Morpheus utters these words after the main character Neo wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiencing the Real as a desolate, war-torn, yet spectacular geography. For Žižek, this represents a prime example of the 20th century's "passion for the Real," for which the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the ultimate artistic expression. His argument is that because this passion was sublimated into the postmodern "passion for the semblance," Americans experienced the "return of the Real" in exactly the same way as Neo did in the film, i.e., as a nightmarish virtual landscape or "reality as the ultimate 'effect.'"
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117 x 45 x 20 cm
2023
☉
Imagine for a moment that someone was to lock the doors where you are right now. Assuming you had no emergency bottles of water, it would take you roughly seven days to die from dehydration. If you were lost in the desert with no water at all, it would take a day and a half.
When the body is forced into extreme situations like heat, cold, or water deprivation, it makes a tactical decision to withdraw resources from the least essential parts first. With dehydration, this initially happens in the kidneys. Our kidneys will reabsorb water that would have been used in urine, so this is why your urine gets darker when you are dehydrated — the urea concentration increases.
When this is still not enough, the body will draw water from your cells and organs to retain the necessary blood pressure to keep you ticking. Your eyes will contract to expose the conjunctiva, your lips will shrivel away entirely, your teeth and gums will project outward like on a skeleton, your skin blackens and dries out, and your tongue becomes a tiny piece of beef jerky. If you are cut, you are too dry to even bleed.
Only after days of this slow torture will you die. With less and less water, the blood in your body will thicken, and your blood pressure will drop drastically. This means that all of the oxygen and nutrients in your blood will take a lot longer to get to your organs, and so they become deprived. Your brain, heart, kidneys, and liver begin to fail. Ultimately, your brain will start to shrink from osmosis in an attempt to hydrate the body (the brain has a lot of water), which eventually will cause you to die.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Excerpt from ‘A gruesome death: the macabre science of dehydration’ (Jonny Thomson, published on Big Think on August 13th, 2021.
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170 x 100 x 16 cm
2023
☉
The Voight-Kampff test was a test used by the LAPD's Blade Runners to assist in determining whether or not an individual was a replicant. The machine used in the test measured bodily functions such as respiration, heart rate, blushing and pupillary dilation in response to emotionally provocative questions. It typically took twenty to thirty cross-referenced questions to detect a Nexus-6 replicant.[1]
"A very advanced form of lie detector that measures contractions of the iris muscle and the presence of invisible airborne particles emitted from the body. The bellows were designed for the latter function and give the machine the menacing air of a sinister insect. The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of his empathic response through carefully worded questions and statements."
The Voight-Kampff machine is perhaps analogous to (and may have been partly inspired by) Alan Turing's work which propounded an artificial intelligence test — to see if a computer could convince a human (by answering set questions, etc.) that it was another human. The phrase Turing test was popularised by science fiction but was not used until years after Turing's death.
The VK test is also strongly reminiscent of the polygraph - a type of lie detector test that measures physiological responses against a pre-established baseline in order to determine whether or not a lie is being told. The line 'Just warming you up, that's all.' spoken by Holden to Leon in the opening scene suggests that a similar baseline is being established.
Also worthy of note is the 'fruit machine', a device developed for use in the Canadian military that aimed to measure pupillary dilation in response to erotic imagery in order to determine whether the subject was homosexual.
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180 x 86 x 55 cm
2023
☉
Thought a lot about Leni,
while toiling away in the studio in the former canteen at Pafawag,
where prisoners from Gross-Rosen would offer sustenance
to their ailing bodies,
Thought a lot about Leni,
directing her gaze at ebony skin that would have otherwise been cremated if there were a given chance,
Thought a lot about Leni,
rummaging through books describing the beauty of far away lands,
yet forever within our control,
Thought a lot about you, Leni,
how you used those ailing bodies for your art and then played the fool when their pain boiled over and surfaced for the whole world to see,
Thought a lot about you, Leni,
about how you’ve erased your history
and thought you’d get away with it,
and yet, here we are.
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125 x 180 x 16 cm
2023
☉
“Oh, come now, Nikita, you can’t keep on rummaging things like that.’
‘But you’ve read it with your own eyes, there don’t have enough of it to support the population!’
‘Bollocks! The Ministry never declared anything of the sort. You’re blowing things out of proportion. We’re on track to fulfil the plan for this year, that’s all there is to it.’
‘Yes, but where do you think they’ll find enough material to meet these quotas?’
‘Never-you-mind…come to think of it, I’d watch it if I were you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You heard me well the first time. Good day!’
As Boris was going down the stairs Nikita’s eyes drifted to the side to one of the statues behind the columns, a huntress with a dog by her side. Such a perfect, serene face to it, too. He stood at the top of the stairs looking at it, as if in a daze. He knew there was no way that those quotas would be met. He had heard from his neighbour the week before that his son had received a summons. How could he receive a summons when he was just 19 years old? Similar stories could be heard throughout the neighbourhood, it would be only a matter of time until people would start putting two and two together. And then… ‘no, it can’t be…’ he told himself with disbelief. As he began descending the stairs, one step quicker than the last until he was practically running and tripping over the last ones, he momentarily threw a furtive glance back at it and could swear that one of its eyes had a small, barely visible, illuminated red dot.
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100 x 45 x 73 cm
2023
☉
Herron came home with a wide smile on his face. He closed the door to the underground dwelling he’d been squatting for the past 10 years without having come across a single other being, human or not. He turned on the radio station and adjusted the frequency dial so as to catch some transmissions.
‘…..sell off oil. I repeat, do not sell off oil. Current stocks are insufficient….’
‘Ugh, not this again’ he thought.
How on Earth was that message still around? It’d been decades since oil wells ran dry and no sooner had the news started spreading that most people decided to switch off all means of communication and go offline.
‘They must’ve forgotten to flip the switch on that one.’
After a while he grew tired of searching as the cold was slowly getting to him. He got up, went for his fur coat, and from a lined inner pocket took out a dusty cloth. Inside was an object he hadn’t come across in recent months, and these were always a treat to find. He gently unfurled the cloth, so old it was disintegrating in his hands. In it was a book with a drawing of a most peculiar animal. What were these called? - he struggled to remember…
…’A seal!’
Indeed, he’d forgotten all about what animals were. He gingerly opened the book, which was surprisingly intact. A strange writing, sharp but decorative, shaped like axes and swords, in bold lettering, lay inside in an unknown language.
‘𝔇𝔞𝔰 ℜ𝔢𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔗𝔦𝔢𝔯𝔢’ stood written at the beginning. And, after a few pages, a year, which someone attempted to erase but had done so imperfectly.
𝔅𝔢𝔯𝔩𝔦𝔫, 1937.
‘Huh.’
Unfazed, he tore the first page. From his coat he produced a box of matches. He crumpled the piece of paper, with its fancy lettering, on the floor and lit the match within his cupped hands, careful as to not let the minuscule flame die out. He lit the first page. His eyes lit up with it.
He then proceeded to carefully inspect each page, with its peculiar text and images of creatures he’d only heard of from his grandmother. After looking at each page he would rip it off and throw it in the small fire that was bouncing gleefully. His smile widened with each page being torn.
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134 x 180 x 8 cm
2023
☉
Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
post-truth
adjective
1. relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."can we find reliable information in these post-truth times?"
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Dimensions variable
2023
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66 x 100 x 3 cm
2023
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62 x 100 x 3 cm
2023
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Mad Men
Found objects (antique walking stick, antique TV antenna), UV print on vinyl, fibreboard, wood, aluminium, plexiglass.
132 x 180 x 12 cm
2023
☉
From The Guardian (19.07.2022):
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Mad Men ended in 2015. The show is only a year either side away from overlapping perfectly with the presidency of Barack Obama. These were years in which, for all of the anguish surrounding 9/11, the war in Iraq and the financial crisis, it was still just about possible for Americans to build noble, unifying narratives about their society. It was still possible to believe, as Martin Luther King once said, that “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” And, yet, even as they cast Mad Men in a darker light, the following years have only added to the show’s resonance.
The office landscape depicted in Mad Men is a discordant symphony of microaggressions. The only people of colour are secretaries. LGBTQ people keep their true sexual identities to themselves. The women are routinely belittled, patronised and subjected to what we would now regard as textbook sexual harassment.
As Don Draper (Jon Hamm) knew, the US in the 20th century was primarily an exercise in branding. What Mad Men did, quite brilliantly, was explore the gaps between grim reality and that most enduring gambit of conceptual image creation: the American Dream. Since the turn of the century, US branding has become less confident. Most of the best dramas find a way of embedding tiny, personal, emotional nuances within wider, grander stories. Mad Men’s genius was to show that they were one and the same. Pretty much everyone in this show was wealthy and attractive. They were also, overwhelmingly, unhappy. This is the hinterland in which advertising thrives: where material solutions can be offered for existential problems.
From The Guardian (19.07.2022):
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Mad Men ended in 2015. The show is only a year either side away from overlapping perfectly with the presidency of Barack Obama. These were years in which, for all of the anguish surrounding 9/11, the war in Iraq and the financial crisis, it was still just about possible for Americans to build noble, unifying narratives about their society. It was still possible to believe, as Martin Luther King once said, that “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” And, yet, even as they cast Mad Men in a darker light, the following years have only added to the show’s resonance.
The office landscape depicted in Mad Men is a discordant symphony of microaggressions. The only people of colour are secretaries. LGBTQ people keep their true sexual identities to themselves. The women are routinely belittled, patronised and subjected to what we would now regard as textbook sexual harassment.
As Don Draper (Jon Hamm) knew, the US in the 20th century was primarily an exercise in branding. What Mad Men did, quite brilliantly, was explore the gaps between grim reality and that most enduring gambit of conceptual image creation: the American Dream. Since the turn of the century, US branding has become less confident. Most of the best dramas find a way of embedding tiny, personal, emotional nuances within wider, grander stories. Mad Men’s genius was to show that they were one and the same. Pretty much everyone in this show was wealthy and attractive. They were also, overwhelmingly, unhappy. This is the hinterland in which advertising thrives: where material solutions can be offered for existential problems.
[More..]
132 x 180 x 12 cm
2023
☉
Viktor went shivering past a brightly lit ad on that late December evening with a sharply dressed officer sitting at a tidy desk perched in front of a dimly lit window. It was snowing. He bought a Christmas present for Jana, his daughter, with the last of his allowance for the month. They'll have to make-do somehow until after the New Year, he only had pennies left in his pocket and Olga had been badgering him about food (or the lack of it) all winter. Oh well, he sighed.
The sleek, neo-noir imagery he was looking at had a neat text at the bottom announcing the latest corporate merger:
''SB- UBP- Securitate- NKVD- KGB- CDS- ŠtB- SS- Stasi- Gestapo- EK- UDBA
Experience today!
We are here for your own good. Don't resist. Assist.
We make your loved ones a thing of the past! Fast!
Now hiring!!!''
He wondered whether they paid well enough to afford water. If yes, he might just give in and sign up.
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180 x 132 x 18 cm
2022
☉
First responders at the scene managed to save the life of just one woman, brunette, who is currently in hospital with serious injuries. Her name has not yet been released to the public due to a concern for privacy. The remaining victims have now been publicly named: Miranda Blake, 21, redhead, Summer Sanders, 23, brunette, Selma Walters, 27, blonde, and Courtney Moss, 24, strawberry blonde, were having a girls night out at the local diner when they were accosted while leaving the establishment by the assumed perpetrator, M.H., a 27-year-old white male, who proceeded to shoot each one at point blank range with an automatic rifle. It has become apparent to prosecutors that one of the victims had gone to the same highschool as the alleged attacker. Chat messages sent by M.H. to the victim via Facebook suggest a romantic infatuation on the part of the male suspect towards the unsuspecting female who then proceeded to reject his advances for a mating partner positioned higher on the food chain, thus offering the species a better chance at evolutionary advancement.
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33 x 84 x 15 cm
2021-2022
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180 x 132 x 18 cm
2022
☉
From Wikipedia**:
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
On Sunday, 19 January 1919, Vaslav Nijinsky made one last public appearance; a solo improvised performance at the Suvretta House in St Moritz. The crowd consisted of skiers, hotel guests, wealthy visitors from abroad, war refugees, assorted social climbers. Bertha Asseo, a family friend, played the piano. Vaslav stood still for a good while before he finally started moving. His dance reflected a wide range of feelings from sadness, anger to joyfulness. His strong feelings towards the devastation of the war, and people who did nothing to stop it, were also reflected in his dance. [56]
…
Nijinsky's Diary was written during the six weeks in 1919 he spent in Switzerland before being committed to the asylum to Zurich. It reflected the decline of his household into chaos.[61] He elevated feeling and action in his writing. It combined elements of autobiography with appeals for compassion toward the less fortunate. Discovering the three notebooks of the diary years later, plus another with letters to a variety of people, his wife published a bowdlerised version of the diary in 1936, translated into English by Jennifer Mattingly.[1] She deleted about 40 per cent of the diary, especially references to bodily functions, sex, and homosexuality, recasting Nijinsky as an "involuntary homosexual." She also removed some of his more unflattering references to her and others close to their household. She moved sections around, obscuring the "march of events" obvious in the original version and toning down some of the odder portions, including trying to distinguish between sections in which he writes as God and others as himself (in the original all such sections are written the same.)[1]
From The New York Review***:
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
To my knowledge, it is the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis. Other important artists have gone mad—Hölderlin, Schumann, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud—but none of them left us a record like this.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
* The title of the show, 'The Well-Upholstered Nightmare', comes from a written review by Will Harrison published on The Baffler website on November 1st 2021.
** Wikipedia page on Vaslav Nijinsky
*** Joan Acocella, Secrets of Nijinsky - The New York Review, January 14th, 1999
From Wikipedia**:
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
On Sunday, 19 January 1919, Vaslav Nijinsky made one last public appearance; a solo improvised performance at the Suvretta House in St Moritz. The crowd consisted of skiers, hotel guests, wealthy visitors from abroad, war refugees, assorted social climbers. Bertha Asseo, a family friend, played the piano. Vaslav stood still for a good while before he finally started moving. His dance reflected a wide range of feelings from sadness, anger to joyfulness. His strong feelings towards the devastation of the war, and people who did nothing to stop it, were also reflected in his dance. [56]
…
Nijinsky's Diary was written during the six weeks in 1919 he spent in Switzerland before being committed to the asylum to Zurich. It reflected the decline of his household into chaos.[61] He elevated feeling and action in his writing. It combined elements of autobiography with appeals for compassion toward the less fortunate. Discovering the three notebooks of the diary years later, plus another with letters to a variety of people, his wife published a bowdlerised version of the diary in 1936, translated into English by Jennifer Mattingly.[1] She deleted about 40 per cent of the diary, especially references to bodily functions, sex, and homosexuality, recasting Nijinsky as an "involuntary homosexual." She also removed some of his more unflattering references to her and others close to their household. She moved sections around, obscuring the "march of events" obvious in the original version and toning down some of the odder portions, including trying to distinguish between sections in which he writes as God and others as himself (in the original all such sections are written the same.)[1]
From The New York Review***:
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
To my knowledge, it is the only sustained, on-the-spot (not retrospective) written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis. Other important artists have gone mad—Hölderlin, Schumann, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud—but none of them left us a record like this.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
* The title of the show, 'The Well-Upholstered Nightmare', comes from a written review by Will Harrison published on The Baffler website on November 1st 2021.
** Wikipedia page on Vaslav Nijinsky
*** Joan Acocella, Secrets of Nijinsky - The New York Review, January 14th, 1999
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55 x 60 x 70 cm
2022
☉
Pam, wake the fuck up! We need to go get some burgers, I need to be at work by 5!!!!
Pam, wake the fuck up! We need to go get some burgers, I need to be at work by 5!!!!
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180 x 127 x 35 cm
2022
xX1990LoneRangerXx was late for a meeting with one of his his workmates from the office when it hit him again. Only this time it wasn’t the usual panic, body shaking violently, sweaty palms and all that crap, oh no… this time it was something peculiar.
He suddenly felt as if he was not part of this world anymore. As he was aiming for the subway, drifting by others as if he were a ghost, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he wasn’t a person anymore, but some sort of primitive organism whose only purpose was to make the big boys in grey suits happy. The more unhappy he was, the more pleased they were.
As he was descending towards the station he noticed that it had been remodelled into a marshland (no doubt a sign of gentrification, his sister had been babbling about these sorts of things for the past year, driving him mad), cold concrete steps gradually giving way to fecund earthy smells, green sludge and insects buzzing about their business. ‘Ugh’, he said to himself, he fucking hated bugs. The floor was now a slowly-moving non-descript liquid brown mix, and as soon as he inserted his foot into it he realised it’s goal was to suck as much of his body as possible under the surface. He stubbornly trudged through for a good ten metres until he realised there was no chance he’d make it all the way to the train, if there even was one running at all. He was in fact pathetically stuck. One guy made it a bit further than he’d had, at the expense of having his balding forehead and crooked nose barely sticking out from the brown muck, struggling to breathe. Poor bastard. At least he was only in it up to his waist.
They were nice enough to leave the advertisements on the walls though. I suppose that’s how you get people to look at them these days, trick them into what amounts to a slow, boring death. He didn’t mind dying, he would often think about it, especially while having his morning coffee, but then he’d remember about his dog and postpone it time and again.
As he was perusing the sleek vitrines one ad in particular caught his eye, featuring a glorious alphamale with golden locks paddling down a wild river in an inflatable raft.
A bloody raft. Why didn’t he think of buying one of those in the first place?
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Requiem for All That We Hold Dear
Found object (tubular chromed steel heater), dried Euphorbia characias ‘Tasmanian Tiger’ (killed off during an unusually-cold winter), wax candles.
93 x 90 x 15 cm
2022
☉
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180 x 125 x 13 cm
2022
☉
Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more
Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when I lost your love
I wake-up in the morning, and I wonder
Why everything's the same as it was
I can't understand, no, I can't understand
How life goes on the way it does
Why does my heart go on beating?
Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when you said, "Good-bye"
Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm
(Why do these eyes of mine cry?)
Mmm, mmm, mmm
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when you said, "Good-bye"
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Songwriters: Arthur Kent / Sylvia Dee
The End of the World lyrics © Campbell Connelly And Co. Ltd., Music Sales Corp., Edward Proffitt Music, Crc Jianian Publishing, Music Sales Corp, Sentric Music Publishing Ltd, Beats Of Arm Songs
Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
'Cause you don't love me any more
Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when I lost your love
I wake-up in the morning, and I wonder
Why everything's the same as it was
I can't understand, no, I can't understand
How life goes on the way it does
Why does my heart go on beating?
Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when you said, "Good-bye"
Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm
(Why do these eyes of mine cry?)
Mmm, mmm, mmm
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when you said, "Good-bye"
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Songwriters: Arthur Kent / Sylvia Dee
The End of the World lyrics © Campbell Connelly And Co. Ltd., Music Sales Corp., Edward Proffitt Music, Crc Jianian Publishing, Music Sales Corp, Sentric Music Publishing Ltd, Beats Of Arm Songs
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180 x 130 cm.
2019
☉
Coleen Becker, art historian, described Aby Warburg’s work on the Mnemosyne Atlas (October 1929) as describing how fundamental images belonging to the Antiquity travel through time, or that of myths, resuscitated in recent times, signalling these elements as the manifestation of a collective psychic discomfort.
In simpler terms, according to Warburg, an older cultural form’s return usually signals a present psychological dysfunction, one that disrupts the individual as well as the collective mind. Becker furthers this idea by observing that ‘ since these images are encryption’s of ‘’eternal truths’’, they function as contemporary vehicles whose function is to establish control over the irrational, even if the inherent belief in their premonitory power in itself lacks logic. (1)
And yet, we piss on those statues because we drink too much.
Coleen Becker, art historian, described Aby Warburg’s work on the Mnemosyne Atlas (October 1929) as describing how fundamental images belonging to the Antiquity travel through time, or that of myths, resuscitated in recent times, signalling these elements as the manifestation of a collective psychic discomfort.
In simpler terms, according to Warburg, an older cultural form’s return usually signals a present psychological dysfunction, one that disrupts the individual as well as the collective mind. Becker furthers this idea by observing that ‘ since these images are encryption’s of ‘’eternal truths’’, they function as contemporary vehicles whose function is to establish control over the irrational, even if the inherent belief in their premonitory power in itself lacks logic. (1)
And yet, we piss on those statues because we drink too much.
[More..]
300 x 120 x 100 cm.
2019
☉
"High power, low self-esteem?
Let’s have one last postmodern party for our dying homeworld, shall we?
Coleen Becker, art historian, described Aby Warburg’s work on the Mnemosyne Atlas (October 1929) as describing how fundamental images belonging to the Antiquity travel through time, or that of myths, resuscitated in recent times, signalling these elements as the manifestation of a collective psychic discomfort.
In simpler terms, according to Warburg, an older cultural form’s return usually signals a present psychological dysfunction, one that disrupts the individual as well as the collective mind. Becker furthers this idea by observing that ‘ since these images are encryption’s of ‘’eternal truths’’, they function as contemporary vehicles whose function is to establish control over the irrational, even if the inherent belief in their premonitory power in itself lacks logic. (1)
And yet, we piss on those statues because we drink too much.
[More..]
70 x 30 x 10 cm
2018
☉
What seldom gets discussed in countries with high GDP is the way in which capital and generated wealth flow out of them, my focus being on two phenomena significant to two opposing social statuses: the upper class dislocates and disrupts markets by purchasing real estate in foreign countries, transforming dwellings and potential homes into hollowed-out investments; the lower class usually finds itself being employed by the former in a country foreign to them. This is the economic refugee. The glowing marquee shown here is an attempt at subversively nodding at a phenomenon that is widespread in Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Communist bloc, in which alienated workers transfer accumulated capital by means of international money transferring services either to families left back home or as an investment into their own existing or future real estate which will, just as in places like London, never get to be called or used as a home.
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2 min 27 sec, looped.
2018
☉
Given the slight, yet noticeable shift in Polish society (as well as other established economies worldwide) in the past few years one encounters very few obstacles in figuring out what can be defined as a possible source of the problem, namely the unequal flow of capital and what kind of consequences this has in the long term, the most obvious one being nazism with a spray tan that’s just the right shade for social media.
While most turn to activism and grassroots methods so as to counter these symptoms, we propose a simple choreography of dissent, to be performed in a public setting by whomever should circumstances require, as a way of honouring the late socialist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s words as well as embodying a performative piece without inherent market value.
To quote Brecht:
‘’Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament only the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are people who want to eat the veal without slaughtering the calf.’’
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2018
☉
Ah, 4chan, such a wonderful cesspool of free speech. If one were to compare online domains to army bases, apart from the inherent networks that sum up both, there is a striking difference: one uses freedom as a shield for deviant behaviour, while one administers freedom as a catchphrase for occupation and coercion. One is chaos embodied, the other prizes discipline. Back in 1939 joining the army was a way of supporting your (synthetic, mediated) beliefs, while today joining the virtual army of trolls is, in some cases, a last resort to alienation. Joining the physical army meant displacement, today being part of a virtual army does not alter one’s presence, if anything it pushes members to signal to the entire world that they are present. Maybe that’s why sports pants don’t have buttons. There’s no time to lose.
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2017
☉
‘You haven’t had that dream in which you go on holiday to Kepler since you were a kid. Doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t have the time or the money to go anywhere. You’re too busy hating on thy neighbour anyway. You lower your eyes in shame at times when buying supplements at the shop when you see that robot’s hand with a golden ring on its finger. Does it have an on/off switch, you desperately wonder?’ So, are we going to admit that those starry-eyed dreams from the Space Race were misled from the beginning, because they failed to take into consideration humanity’s intrinsic shittiness? I mean, we had, and still have, far right extremists for fuck’s sake, on the streets, in our friends’ lists. Are we just going to dance our worries away or go to the opera like the little pretentious art pricks we claim to be?
For the past recent months I’ve been thinking incessantly about a couple of cult classics: Blade Runner and Ghost in The Shell, both films which I’ve only watched for the first time this year on purpose. Call it female intuition, but with some movies I feel when the time is right to finally experience them. We tend to focus so much on futurisms; accelerationism and devouring ourselves that we fail to see how blind we are. How can you possibly move forward and build when you can’t seem to notice the ruins around you? Notions of feminism, human rights, the anthropocene and the likes are thrown around in a feed, glanced at for 5 seconds and processed on the spot; no introspection, no soul-searching; maybe that’s why religion is both on the rise and crumbling at the same time: ain’t nobody got time for dat.
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Wrocław, Poland
andreea.anghel.cigaro@gmail.com
Artwork inquiries:
SUPRAINFINIT
suprainfinitgallery@gmail.com
+(40) 735 032 909
Born and raised in Romania in the early 90s, Andreea Anghel lives and works in Wrocław, Poland since 2011. Her work mixes ready-mades, found pieces of Midcentury furniture, assemblage as a writing technique, with newly built elements and curiosity cabinets that involve durational and emotional labour. Inspired by situations and elements that at first glance may seem common, Anghel’s artistic language reverts that easiness and brings forth uncanniness in a sensibility that channels both care and irony.
✧
Andreea Anghel’s artistic practice is characterized by the need to delve into visual and symbolic layers by combining ready-made objects with carefully designed sculptural or mise-en-scène elements. She accentuates manual work and emotional labour as important features of her work. The artist’s experiments often raise issues of identity, memory and the relationship between the entity and its surroundings. By overlapping layers that are seemingly distant from each other in terms of meaning and history, she creates three-dimensional compositions full of symbolism, which evoke personal memories, often forcing one to question the perception of reality. Light and sound in many of Anghel’s objects give a sense of the uncanny and at the same time create an intimate contact with the art installations.
The artist often uses materials from archival publications and various types of artefacts. Her body of work includes an ever-growing repository of images and objects collected from many sources. For example, Andreea sources from Soviet or Nazi propaganda publications in which utopian visions of everyday life and art have been transformed into a tool of colonialism. The artist extracts individual elements from them to visualise the nationalist and conservative aspirations of their authors. Many of the works in the series include objects surprisingly reminiscent of shop windows. They are filled with graphic features and specific lighting and evoke associations with the aesthetics of advertising known from previous decades.⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯Romuald Demidenko
The artist adopts a gleaner’s gaze that animates through reinterpretation. The insertion of found objects, often in a disused state, fosters an anti-ad aesthetic, as commodity and waste collide in narratives of daily life. Artefacts of early and late modernity circulate non-chronologically inside her works, reversing references and the norms they are attached to. Building and archiving (personal) histories, pasts are reactivated in the present to question temporal linearity. Through the chosen images, pieces of furniture, church candles, modernist design fragments, the artist allows disruptive counter-memories to emerge.⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯Cristina Vasilescu & Maria Persu
Art Fair
20-24.05.2026
Aleja Róż 1, 00-556 Warsaw, Poland
Weaving Together What Is Still Becoming - Institutional group show @ Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ustka, Poland, curated by Agnieszka Kilian, Magdalena Ujma, Romuald Demidenko [28.03 – 31.05.2026]
Open System - Group show @ Bliss Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, curated by Katarzyna Piskorz [13.03 - 11.04.2026]
12.:47 PM ◦ 11:47 AM - Solo show @ ZETO, Wrocław, Poland [04.02 - 05.02.2026]
2025
The Blind Man - Institutional solo show @ 66P Subjective Institution of Culture, Wrocław, Poland, curated by Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka [4.12.2025 - 21.02.2026]
The House with Golden Nostrils - Group show @ The Darvas-La Roche House, Oradea, Romania, curated by Diana Marincu and Mihai Toth [7.11.2025 - 07.02.2026]
Inheritance - Institutional group show @ BWA Wrocław, Poland, curated by Ania Batko [17.10.2025 - 25.01.2026]
Only Ghosts Move Forward - Group show @ Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest, Romania [25.09 - 14.11.2025]
thank you for recording - Group show @ Turnus Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, curated by Andreea Goța [17.07 - 10.08.2025]
There were times I wanted to change the world - Official collateral event of the Art Encounters Biennial - Group show @ Paltim, Timișoara, Romania, curated by Diana Marincu [31.05 - 13.07.2025]
Unleashing the Sins of Sculpture - A survey exhibition of contemporary Romanian female sculptors - Group show @ Scânteia+, Bucharest, Romania, curated by Cristina Vasilescu and Georgiana Tidorescu [27.03 - 8.05.2025]
One Eye Laughing, the Other Crying. Art From Romania. Ovidiu Șandor Collection - Institutional group show @ International Cultural Centre, Krakow, Poland [8.03 - 20.07.2025]
2024
Calling things that don't have names - Group show @ Copperfield, London [05.10 - 23.11.2024]
UNITED NATIONS - Group show @ Galeria W Y, Łódź, Poland [12.09 - 30.09.2024]
Skin of The Shapeshifter - Group show @ Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest, Romania, curated by Cristina Vasilescu [23.11.2023 - 09.03.2024]
2023
Crash Club - Group show @ Pawilon Bliska_12 , Warsaw, Poland (Warsaw Gallery Weekend), curated by Philip Ortelli [28.09 - 01.10.2023]
Sediments. The Matter-Image - Group show @ Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest, Romania [21.06 - 30.07.2023]
AFFAIR Warsaw | meltdown - Group show @ Piktogram Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, curated by Michał Woliński and Cristina Vasilescu [26.05 - 01.07.2023]
UNTITLED (EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE) - Duo institutional show - Andreea Anghel / Radek Szlaga @ MOS, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, curated by Romuald Demidenko [13.05 - 25.06.2023]
Volume By Layers - Group show @ CazarmaU, Timișoara, Romania, curated by Ciprian Mureșan [04.05 - 30.11.2023]
2022
The Well-Upholstered Nightmare - Solo show @ Zina Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, curated by Flaviu Rogojan [8.07 - 1.10.2022]
2021
The Current Affair of Some Young Romanian Artists - Group show @ Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, Romania, curated by Robert Băjenaru [8.09 - 9.10.2021]
Silver Shining Tears at 3 a.m - Duo show Andreea Anghel / Łukasz Stokłosa @ Galeria Śmierć Człowieka, Warsaw, Poland, curated by Kamil #2 [18.07 - 30.07.2021]
HEARTBEAT 20 (New Entries in the MNAC Collection) - Institutional group show @ Kunsthalle Bega, Timișoara, Romania [14.05 - 11.07.2021]
12 Years After. A Survey of Romanian Art in 180 Works - Exhibition of Acquisitions for the Museum's Permanent Collection @ National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest, Romania [11.12.2020 – 28.03.2021]
2020
SIMULTAN FESTIVAL XV. ”UNSEEN” - Timișoara, Romania [27.09 - 3.10.2020]
Exception of (not) being - Online-only group show curated by Essenza Club and Rhizome Parking Garage (Ongoing since August 2020)
2019
I really miss Adorno - Solo show @ Galerie Klubovna, Brno, Czech Republic, curated by Marta Fišerová [04.12 - 22.12.2019]
CALLOSUM - Group show @ Mobius Gallery, Bucharest, Romania, curated by Adriana Blidaru [23.08 - 25.09.2019]
Know Every Way Out Of Your House - Solo show @ Cave Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland, curated by Barbara Żłobińska and Mariusz Maślanka [15.03 - 31.03.2019]
Contemporary Visions 9 - Group show @ BEERS London, United Kingdom [1.03 - 30.03.2019]
Sanguinaccio Dolce - Kitchen For A Despicable Ruse - Group show @ Atelier 35 / Bucharest, Romania, curated by Carmen Casiuc [8.12.2018 - 31.01.2019]
2018
Where Do We Go From Here? - Group show @ Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest, Romania [19.10 - 28.10.2018]
Media Art Festival Arad 5th Edition: De Rerum Natura - Group show @ Arad Museum Complex, Natural History Section, Arad, Romania. Curated by Călin Man and Ileana Selejan. [5.10 - 3.11.2018]
I'd Rather Not Say Hello But Something Else Instead - Duo show Andreea Anghel / Mocan Alexandra @ Matca Artspace, Cluj-Napoca, Romania [07.06 - 10.07.2018]
2017
Plymouth Contemporary Open - Group show @ Peninsula Art Gallery / KARST, Plymouth, UK [15.07 - 02.09.2017]
2015
‘ppm - pages-per-minute’ - Pop-up group show as part of the AiciAcolo Pop Up Gallery program, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, [30.10.2015]
‘National Exhibition of the Top Art Diplomas from Polish Academies of Art’ - Group show @ The Great Armory and Aula of the Academy of Art and Design in Gdansk, Poland [17.07 - 23.08.2015]
MNAC - National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania
The Ovidiu Șandor Collection
- 2011 Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland,
Erasmus Scholarship, summer semester, Visual Arts.
Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design Wrocław, Poland
- Printmaking Department ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Masters’ Degree: Experimental Printmaking and Visual Arts (graduated 2015)
Plymouth Contemporary 2017 - New Artist Award
300 Romanian Artists 1990-2020 - Published by Propagarta (2024)
After Sculpture / Sculpture After - edited by Sorina Jecza - Published by the Triade Foundation (2024)
Last updated 24.04.2026