SITTING SOMEWHERE (with Hanne Jannasch), 2022

ongoing project of interventions and installations at HfBK Dresden, July 15-24 and Exhibit Studio, Vienna, July 12 - Sept. 30, 2022

The Monobloc chair has been manufactured globally since the 1970s and is widely affordable, which has led to its ubiquity across the world. To a degree it is a reminder of social equality, as it is accessible for almost everyone. As an iconic cultural object, the Monobloc chair became attached to a diversity of associations that might differ in different cultural backgrounds. 

Based on collected associations, primarily two contrary ideas collide in the paradoxical aesthetic of these chairs: the idea of ‘home’ (Heimat) and ‘non-place’ (Un-Ort). The project examines how one associates this chair with certain types of places and how the chair (re-)defines those places according to how they are perceived. By placing and documenting these chairs in different surroundings, the project observes how they are changed by the intervention: a series of staged photographs of Monobloc chairs that are temporarily installed in a diversity of non-places is opposed with archival photographs from family albums, in which the image of the chair induces subjective, domestic memories. Likewise, the weirdly timeless object’s ubiquity is portrayed by the looped video work.

In a practice of appropriation through intervention, the ‘elitist’ exhibition space is confronted with the cheaply mass produced chair: on one hand it is reminiscent of social equality and undergoes the privileged space and on the other hand marks the exhibition space as a non-place.