Wolf-Günter Thiel

What does it mean when artists begin to define themselves by collecting objects, rather than creating them? Artists simulate scientific research by exhibiting things they have gathered, categorized, documented, counted, archived, stacked and stored by analogical thinking as Michel Foucault puts it.

Others are documenting, counting, and archiving aspects of their lives and making objects that record these processes. Kristian von Hornsleth plays on this idea and deconstructs it by mystification of the act of archiving as well as the way of storing the archives. The idea is to create a story like Homers Illiade and make people part of a story which people may tell in the future to understand our times from a future perspective. Hornsleth claims the position of an artist as an “Übermensch”.

Kristian von Hornsleth is collecting blood samples and dna of people who are dedicated Hornsleth Art Lovers. In earlier times of civilization we would call it a tribal ritus. A ritus in order to manifest the tribal existence in a far away mythological future. Hornsleth himself as the shamane of his own people conserves their cultural existence. His artistic act is a synonym for the cave paintings, which show tribal hunting scenes in the pre historical times of human existence. The wish is the documentation of existence as “deep storage” of dna as part of the individual blood prove. The technological believe in progressive natural sciences evokes the idea of another cycle of existence in a far away future. The believe is that future science can evoke the today human individuals through their dna . Hornsleth himself speaks of this possibility a second existence. Earlier civilizations would have
respected an approach like this as “übermenschlich”…

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