Emil/B5044 (2018/19)
Emil the Orangutan was a pet of a Serbian civil servant, who, due to a job transfer, had to sell Emil to the Schönbrunn Zoo. Between 1927 and 1938, Emil had been a media star and a favourite attraction in Vienna – until he became extremely fat and so depressed that he refused every contact. After his death, Emil’s body parts were scattered around scientific institutions and museum collections. Only his skull remains missing. A research project done in collaboration with the Schönbrunn Zoo; The Natural History Museum Vienna; Zoological Collection of the Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna, Austria. link to video: https://vimeo.com/326091559 and https://vimeo.com/330615430

People in the Open Air* (2019)
People in the Open Air* is a visual essay on the ‘behaviour’ of photographs during the World War II. It explores how the everyday functions in war through a restrictive selection of private and institutional photographs which are built up around a common thread: how people positioned themselves in relation to new environments and landscapes. The work considers the relationship between the visually similar scenes depicted by an Austrian (civilian) family on vacation, an amateur soldier-photographer and Jewish civilians who went into hiding, often as tourists abroad. These photographs were often made as snapshots or holiday photos, landscape or cityscape shots, but only when we find out the context of the image, the contrast between the actual truth and the played out truth increases: a beautiful landscape can mean quite the opposite when they meet the historical circumstances, or who created the image and why. By examining the potential of photography to tell (a) history, by contrasting the visually similar photographs taken in entirely different contexts, the project wish to question our relation to these images and their meaning: to question the power of representation – photography’s means for constructing and understanding reality. Researching the historical facts of the places depicted on the photographs by the Austrians and the personal histories of the Jews in hiding, the project wish to present an index of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the surface of an image. In a form of a visual essay, the project is depending on language interpretation by appropriating the titles from the Foto-Beobachter manual. With subtle politics, the narration takes an undertone of an instruction of how the images can be interpreted. Subjectively picked from the picture archives of Volkskundemuseum (Vienna, Austria), Jewish Historical Museum (Belgrade, Serbia), USHMM (Washington, USA), Bundesarchiv (Koblenz, Germany), The Wiener Library (London, UK) and from the hungarian newspaper Illustrated Sunday (Képes Vasárnap, private archive), the work also tackles the dialectic between seemingly apolitical vernacular photography (individual subjectivities) and propagandistic photographs (public ideology). * Title taken from the article: Hans Walther, Menschen im Freilicht (Foto Beobachter, Juli 1941, 11. Jahrg. Heft 7)

Tiergarten (2018)
7-part Billboardinstallation at FLUC, Vienna///Through history, zoo´s transformed the way we see animals and ourselves. Emerging as an emblem of a colonial power, zoo´s have been always inspired critical debates. The photographic installation shows one part of the `´Primates´´ picture archive, which was photographed in the Schonbrunn Zoo on the request of a former Zoo director Otto Antonius (1925-1945). Installing the great ape portraits at the Praterstern railway station have the intention to re-interprete the context of the Praterstern as a site of control and transgression, but also to question the idea of identity - our ambiguous relationship with animals, and also with fellow humans. In context with the `´Problemzone Pratersten´´ where the `looking relations´ are very much determined by social structures, national identity, power hierarchies and politics it is important to reflect: who is looking and who is the observed one? It opens up a question of the cross-cultural misunderstanding we are facing today. Because, `all sites of enforced marginalization - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps - have something in common with zoos.’ (John Berger, `Why Look at animals´, in About Looking, 1980).