“beast´s (g)love”, 1995 / 2005
Installation. Seven adhesive tapes, black leather glove, door, gap
an ad hoc sculptural relation

The work was originally made in 1995–96. I reactivated it in 2005 and gave it its current title. I don’t remember what the original title was, or if it even had one. In 1995, I was in my second year at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK Berlin). Usually, we worked in large shared studios, but that year I had a small 25 m² studio of my own. It was connected by an inner door to another solo studio, where a classmate worked with stone sculpture — often using discarded stones from workshops that made cemetery plaques.

My studio had large windows facing the courtyard; I couldn’t open them because the space housed the video/photography equipment of Rebecca Horn’s studio, where I studied. The windows were barred for security reasons — at least, that’s how I remember them; The room was high, about six meters, giving it a strange mix of openness and claustrophobia.

Adhesive tapes were everywhere in that space — part of my process, a tool, almost an obsession. I remember a kind of fetishistic relationship with them. I worked in that studio for one semester, making pieces that responded directly to the space and its objects: chairs, boards, radiators, the walls themselves.

This particular work could be described as an ad hoc sculptural relation, formed spontaneously — a rhythm of thought shaped together with the space and its elements,
as a dialogue between thought, material, and environment. Tapes — normally a supportive, secondary material: they bind, mask, mark, or repair. In this work, however, they act within the space, carrying tension and narrative potential, a kind of sticky presence or “virus.”; they have agency.

You can read the work as forces or movements in space: seven rolls of tape are stacked on top of each other. The third one unrolls about 30 cm and attaches to the door, holding onto its surface creating a diagonal tension toward the room. The stack seems to lift upward, a subtle lift. The door is slightly open — a crack, a gap, maybe a promise of access— yet the other side remains unseen. This fragile attachment, this “gap,” becomes both boundary and possibility.

Then suddenly (perhaps) a heavy black leather glove falls onto the tapes. I call it my (g)love. An everyday (g)love, protective, shielding from the cold — yet in the photo it feels unreadable— its form and colour introduce tension and weight, perhaps violence. Maybe I placed it there deliberately, or it simply fell — the possibilities remain open. It could touch gently, or interrupt, dominate or care. There’s an element of institutional BDSM — the authority of the school, care and control and vulnerability at once. It both cuts and protects a flow, echoing the institutional context of the art school itself.

These objects carry stories that aren’t fixed; they change, their meaning shifts depending on who looks, from what position, and when — just as my own relationship to the work evolved when I titled it ten years later.

Looking back, I think this sculptural object translated my feelings and relationship to both the institutional and personal (artistic thus political) space of my studio at the art school — as struggling forces, as a reflection of how my body felt and moved within it; my negotiation with space, structure, and constraint.