When have you decided to start your art career?

That’s a delicate question to answer. In the end I must say, that I didn’t take the decision from one day to the other. It rather was a process of years that finally made me decide to enroll at an Art Academy and seriously start an art career – whatever that means. Until now I’m not sure, if it’s about a decision at all. It seems to be more about the admittance that it’s the only way to go. But if you want it more tangibly, I’d say that the first seed was planted when I was about 12 years old. Back then my best friend asked me what I would like to become later. And my answer was, that I want to become an artist. I still remember that moment very precisely as my answer surprised and also kind of shocked me.

Back then the possibility to be an artist seemed lightyears away from what could be possible. I also could have said, that I’d like to become a knight to fight dragons one day – this wouldn’t have felt more unlikely. But still I understood something very important back then – that in the end it’s on me to make it happen. The final decision to apply at an Academy then was taken, when I already studied chemistry. I had started this subject mainly because it would have guaranteed a well payed job, but also because I liked the field and I was simply very good at it. But after some weeks, I realized that I was missing something of crucial importance for me and that this whole setting I chose wouldn’t provide at all. I simply needed to draw and instead of concentrating on my studies, I spent more and more time with that. At that moment in 2002 I knew what I needed to do.

In a way this path of becoming an artist very akin to the way I approach my work today. I often compare my process with the work of a gardener. I put ideas like seeds in fertile soil, water and feed them so they hopefully sprout. I touch those sprouts during that process, experiencing how they react to my heat and how they make me feel. I may feel rejected after all, but considering to change the environmental conditions in there can already turn into a kind of answer. But sometimes I have to cut them down again and burn all of it to ashes, that provide the fertilizer for sprouting new seeds. If I’m more lucky, those new plants grow together into an entire garden and I can start harvesting the fruit.

Could you tell me about your musical New Wave background and how it influenced your art later?

Music always played a very important role in my life. But the discovery of Joy Division through »Control« by Anton Corbijn, which was rather a car crash than a contact had an impact on me personally as well as on my art that I still can sense. I always had a crush for Grunge, Punk and New Wave, but back then something else something much stronger happened to me. Anyway – and it didn’t change until now – I always admired the ability of music to intrude and influence emotions directly. For me it’s still the most powerful of the arts. It’s not my field, I know that. But I always took most of my inspiration from music and while drawing it’s a necessity for me to be surrounded by it. During my time at the Academy I necessarily wanted to sing in a band. I wrote a lot of songs and tried to contact several bands or start my own. Nothing ever came of it. But I continued to experiment in this field and tried to find new forms of integration from my musical enthusiasm into visual arts.

One major step into this direction was caused by what first seemed to be an accident. But in the end it turned out to be extremely fruitful and led to a kind of concept album and an entire exhibition with drawings that were created directly from one of the tracks. I would not say that it is an album in the classical sense – rather a collection of soundscapes. On a journey from Berlin into the mountains of Kaukasus in autumn 2014 the memory card of my camera was damaged when I needed to send a photo from Istanbul for the announcement of my upcoming solo exhibition. It was the time of the Islamic State’s siege of Kobanê, and since I lived in Beyoğlu, a district inhabited mainly by Kurds, I experienced clashes between residents and the police every single night.

Sometimes I had to wait until late at night to get into my apartment because the tear gas did not allow me to pass before. Of the stored video recordings, only the sound files were left readable as fragments. So only these digital traces of individual sound scenes remained: street fights – with helicopters circling over Istanbul, border crossings, rivers, the Bosporus. Ultimately, it was a stroke of luck, because I had to rely on my memories and was forced to work with the existing sound recordings. Back in Berlin, I worked on a series of soundscapes that consisted mainly of layers of these unrecognizable stretched tracks – something like the soundtrack of a fragmentary dystopia. It struck me that the visual representations of these soundscapes had a lot to do with the pictures I had supposedly filmed: dark, almost unrecognizable landscapes reminiscent of reflections on a watery surface.