As a conceptual artist, Franziska Ostermann’s medium is the word and the image. The central themes of her work are virtuality and identity. An important motif for Ostermann is the photographic self-portrait. Dealing with one’s being, online and offline, is the starting point of her work. The photographic self-portrait allows Ostermann to encounter herself. When the shutter is released, she is both the photographer and the photographed, in the same place. Is she doubled or split? Photographic splinters of our selves’ views represent our identity in a place that we cannot enter. The physicality itself becomes a barrier to its representation.
Photography can act as a mediator between the real and the virtual. In the form of a photograph, the body can cross the physical, real-world threshold into the virtuality of the digital.
But this transformation is not the exact opposite of its original form. In photographs, views of faces become outsourced fragments of an ego that find their own identity in the digital and the Internet’s virtuality and develop a second reality, independent of their creator. They floatingly form a new shape. Ostermann examines these splinter identities, revolves around them, and makes them visible on the intermediate level between virtuality and reality.
Self-taught or art school?
In my early teens, I started to photograph myself. As I grew into it, I learned more and more about the medium and its techniques. But it wasn´t until I followed photography to art school that I learned to classify my work process theoretically.
My practice has been an interplay of intuition and concept ever since.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
One that I could resell at a ridiculously high price to gain my financial freedom and make a difference in the contemporary art scene monetarily. So probably a masterpiece of a dead, male, white artist.
How would you describe your style?
The colour white plays a key role in my work. It interconnects my bodies of work to each other as well as to my ongoing process and myself. Standing in front of my photographs, at first, they may appear minimalistic or classic in style. But if you take a closer look, you will see the different layers, interactions and imperfections that reflect on the medium they are presented through ISO noise and perspectives that do not quite match blurs that are no subjects to logic. The images are orchestrated, composed of many. You are looking at a photograph revealing its own materiality, its visual limits and artistic prospects.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
Word and image are the media I work with most. I explore themes of identity and virtuality throughout them, and their relationship to each other has me fascinated. One important motif throughout my work is the photographic self-portrait. In the trigger pulling moment, I am the photographer and the photographed at the same time, doubled in time and space. This duality to me is a symbol of the uncountable versions and splinters that form the self. I like to take this issue on in the composition of my pictures.
Is narrative important within your work?
Narrative to me is a very restricted word, it holds a notion of causal linearity that I would like to exchange with a more anachronistic process. The narrative relation of my work becomes most visible through the holistic view of my work. While everybody of work has its own strand of narrative, in their conclusion they reveal a clearer and more extensive look at their underlying themes.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
I admire many artists that I could not contain within this answer. Artist working on contemporary topics inspire me a lot. Colleagues and contemporaries like Hannah Neckel or Arvida Byström exploring the internet in all of its facets, photographers working on the edges of their medium like Barbara Probst, or Sophie Calle who explores the interplay of text and photography.
What or who inspires your art?
Poetry of any kind, may it be written or in the every day, other artists work and their processes, exhibitions and the internet.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I live and work in Northern Germany. My studio is my sanctuary. This is where I take my pictures, write and travel the internet. Long white curtains shield me from the world and let the bright daylight in that I gather to shoot. This is where my pictures reside and tour to exhibitions from. I enjoy their company.
Do you have any studio rituals?
I only dress in white, the items surrounding me wear my favourite colour as well. This habit goes way beyond my studio walls. I love that white marks either the presence or the absence of all colours simultaneously.
What are you working on currently?
As a digital native-born in the 90ies and growing up with the internet, digitalization had me fascinated since I can remember. With the changing times and the increasing exigency for human contact via the digital due to the pandemic, I feel drawn to questioning the differences of human emotions and feelings communicated online and offline.
Where can we buy your art?
Please feel free to contact me directly about any artwork, for further information visit www.franziskaostermann.de
You can also purchase selected images at meetfrida.at
