The exhibition “I Saw You” explores representations of human encounters, bodies, body language, and forms of correspondence as they appear within different cultural archives. It fragments, deconstructs, and rearranges these materials. Universal, timeless and placeless themes of identity, the body, relationships, and communication converge in the exhibition through fictional, past, and contemporary records of human interaction.
The image materials used are cultural residues, discarded artifacts, as well as stereotypes and archetypes sourced from flea markets, old books on Hollywood, magazines, and vintage photographs. Detached from their original contexts and newly condensed, they tell stories of a collective visual culture and reveal the extent to which our ideas of intimacy, identity, gender, and interpersonal relationships are shaped by the images we consume and internalize.
The practice of appropriation, detachment, and fragmentation, together with the technique of collage and the creation of in-between spaces, reveals not only the material itself but also the mechanisms and meanings embedded within images. Archives are not understood as closed and neutral repositories, but as carriers of memory and reflections of collective desires, fears, and ideologies — as cultural “organs of memory” that can be reanimated in order to question the authority of images and open them up to alternative meanings.

The wall installation “The Space Between Us” consists of approximately 300 cut-outs from found images, showing the spaces between mostly two depicted figures after the bodies have been removed from their respective images. The often overlooked space between bodies becomes the actual subject: fragments, blurs, suggested landscapes, interiors, architecture, or shadows form a fragile in- between — a zone in which meanings shift, expectations emerge, and intimacy is suggested.

The series “Ein einsamer Ort” (“A Lonely Place”) literally reverses the meaning of the original gaze by dividing, shifting, and rearranging both the image and its protagonists, creating new and variable correspondences. The collage work “Strange Feeling” continues this approach by reversing the gaze and transforming fragmented bodies into hybrid creatures.

In the mirror installation “I Saw You,” visitors encounter not only themselves but also the hopeful attempts of people in New York to reconnect with individuals they briefly encountered in everyday life — on the subway, in a supermarket, at the cinema, or on the street. The anonymous personal ads originate from the “Missed Connections” section of the online platform Craigslist and reflect universal desires and projections, as well as life in a metropolis and the loneliness associated with it.

The exhibition shifts attention away from seeing as something that is always produced, mediated, and filtered, and directs perception toward presence and absence, toward those gaps in which closeness is imagined, meanings are displaced, and expectations are formed. At the center are those interpretative in-between spaces that emerge between archive, artist, and viewer, opening up possi- bilities for ambiguity, openness, and complexity.

1. »Ein einsamer Ort (I-VI)« , 2017
Found images on cardboard, each 22 x 30 cm

2. »Strange Feeling (V)«, 2025
Cut-out & collage, original vintage print on cardboard, 18 x 21 cm

3. »I Saw You«, 2026
Spy mirror, plexiglass, projection film (Ø 60 cm), slide projection with 80 analog slides, found texts from the online section „Missed Connections“ (Craigslist, 2026), timer

4. »The Space between us«, 2026
Wall installation with 300 found images and cut-outs, dimensions variable