Falk Haberkorn

Falk Haberkorn examines the border between image and language, formation and formulation, photography and text. The question of how the artist can inscribe himself into the world, into history as well as into the present is crucial to and often reflected in his work. However, he does not see this artist-author as creator ex nihilo but rather as someone who stands in a certain tradition and who sustains something in a critical manner. Dealing with memory and tradition, preservation and erasure, conferment and loss is the basis on which he elaborates his scripture-images and performative site-specific works.

In most of Haberkorn’s works, the tabula rasa of an untouched surface is ideally overdrawn by an indestructible trace of script. In addition, the comprehensive transcription not only follows visually, but also content-wise, a networked structure: passages and quotations of literary and humanistic texts that recurs in different modes to issues of memory are so intertwined and interwoven that – according to the principle of montage, alliance and association – a mental reference space opens up that appears to be infinitely expandable. Over the years his works have become more and more performative, i.e. they are born as actions of writing or image.