We all wonder about you using materials such as harnesses, black liquid rubber and chains in your artworks. Where does your research is coming from?

It is always ideas that brings me to materials. In the 90s, I started doing large architectural installations. The material I used for those works came from the field of construction. At the same time, I became particularly interested in the construction of sexual identity via architecture, which in turn brought me to the representation of sexual behaviors – their clichés and origins, as well as how they are expressed and what that expression becomes outside of what is codified as the norm. I research continuously about psychoanalysis and sexuality, as well as labor, feminism, the design of architecture and urbanity, to understand how private and institutional spaces dictate codex of behavior. That is how works like The Fetishism of Commodity, 2002, Never Again, 2005, the Leather Tools, 2009, Stonewalls, 2002, NEVER TIRE, 2020, or Straps and Mirrors, 2010, came about.

What does “fetishism” mean to you and to your practice?

Art is the fetish per excellence. What I do and what all artists do is produce objects of desire that almost nobody can own and even if you do, you do not own the mind of the artist. So, in that sense you could even think of museums as large clubs or sex houses, places of orgies, annoyances, and pleasure. There is of course the classical classification of fetishism via Freud or Marx, as so well elaborated by Linda Williams in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, which has been an influential book for my praxis when I read it in the early 2000.

I often read that your work is described as an investigation of control, gender, space, surveillance, and power is that so? And which element would be the fundamental one?

Yes, I often read the same, someone must have written it and everybody else repeats it. I especially do not really know what to do with the aspect of surveillance…

Which installation and where would be the most memorable and precious to you?

The artworks that are the most memorable for artists are usually the ones which were either the most difficult to realize, or those where one dared to do something risky and it still paid off. Or they stand out in memory for the people or circumstances that facilitated them happening. For instance, the series of works Neck to Knees, 2016 and Hard String, 2017 are all very precious to me, as well as the drawings Places of ID’s, 1996, or the earlier Wallfuckin’, 1995. These are works on paper which were experimental in nature and quite unique with how they dealt with theme and material. Memorable to me are also the installation Plastered, 1998, the video work No Head Man, 2009, the I Cannot Hide My Anger installation from 2019, Stairway to Hell, 2003, in Istanbul, as well as the large-scale public sculptures She Lies, 2010, in the Oslo harbor, and RUN, 2012, in London.