Artist Statement

My art practice evolves around the themes of social context and space, as well as the performative aspect of making and experiencing art. My interest in social space stems from my studies in architecture, which eventually led me to study for a second master’s degree in art at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with public art artists such as Dennis Adams and Krzysztof Wodiczko, and performance artist Joan Jonas.

I take the tradition of site-specific art as a point of departure, while addressing social, political, and economic conditions of a site.  I create places for negotiation of diverse cultural, physical, and emotional knowledges ­ like Finnish sauna bathing tradition vs. American sensitivity to nudity.  By artistic interventions into social contexts like the Public Sauna at P.S.1 in New York (2000), I aim to provoke passer bys to perform and experience a particular social practice, bringing about a re-evaluation of notions of corporeality and public sphere.

Working with video, I perceive the act of recording as performative and part of the content of the work.  In residency at the World Financial Center, right next to the World Trade Center disaster site, I submerged a camera in the harbor nearby, in an attempt to create a point of access to an otherwise impenetrable corporate environment further rendered paranoid by the trauma of 9/11. Tracing an ‘axis of architectural removals’ I have continued this series of videos in Berlin and Warsaw, submerging my camera in the Spree and Wiesla rivers.

As with video, my approach to drawing is informed by the tradition of performance art.  After videotaping myself re-enacting gestures of mourning captured in photographs in the New York Times, I traced these gestures from video stills with pencil.  By exhibiting both the tracings and the enactments, I tried to illuminate some of the relationships between a photograph, its mediation, and the idea of original content, in this instance human emotional reaction to terrorism.