(In-visible)
They are everywhere. Like ghosts, they live among us without our noticing them. We encounter them at every turn: on the way to Saturday shopping, out and about with friends, on the way home from work. We do not see them as they rummage through bins for carelessly discarded deposit bottles, sell a street magazine, or search for somewhere to rest for the night. They appear as though invisible; we look straight through them — out of helplessness, fear, revulsion, indifference.
My project concerns itself with people on the margins of society; those who have been excluded, who have lost their footing and lead an existence we cannot begin to imagine. And yet — or perhaps precisely because of this — we do not perceive them; we do not wish to see what is happening before our very eyes. Through my work, I want to draw attention to these blind spots in our perception.
Their figures are rendered in white; these are not depictions of "picturesque poverty", nor exercises in hand-wringing sentiment. On the contrary, the images preserve the privacy of the individuals portrayed. By representing them as white-painted "silhouettes", they become invisible in the literal sense — yet at the same time, this focuses the viewer's gaze and brings them and their situation visibly into our consciousness.
Images were printed A0 size and displayed as posters mounted with bulldog clips directly onto the walls of in the church hall of Lutherkirche Düsseldorf. I had arranged a collection for the street magazine fifty-fifty for the duration of the exhibition.