(capsules) Ben Greber

Ben, your window also shows something that is disappearing, in a very different way. What are you presenting?
The installation High Fidelity consists of four plastic casts of hi-fi components: a record player, an amplifier and two speakers. They are placed on a display unit and arranged like a classic presentation in a hi-fi store window. Despite their shiny, hyper-aesthetic surfaces, the casts are not intact. They have cracks and resemble crumbling concrete. They become a ruin of their own image and thereby embody the process of their own de-objectification.

How did de-objectification become your central theme?
It is the result of an artistic process. It began during my studies with Katharina Fritsch at the Kunstakademie Münster, where I made hyper-realistic replicas of technical objects out of cardboard. Eventually, I realised that mere replication wouldn’t get me any further if I wanted to get to the heart of things. So I began dismantling my representational sculptures and archiving the resulting materials. Soon I noticed that there are developments in the real world that are quite comparable to this process of abstraction: the disappearance of visible correlations is well underway. So I don’t see my work as abstraction, but as a replication of real processes of de-objectification.

Why the stereo system?
I first used a record player in an installation for the exhibition Green Machine at Konschthal Esch in 2023/24. For that work, we cast remnants of illegal techno raves found in the vaulted cellars of a decommissioned steelworks in Esch. I was drawn to the image of an abandoned party in the vanishing remains of European heavy industry. Later, I developed the record player into an autonomous sculpture that incorporates its own decay. After all, it is an object that has become obsolete with digitalisation. Digitalisation not only plunges the post-war fetishisation of objects into an identity crisis, it also upends our ideas of interior design and spacious living. What do we need a spacious living room for if we no longer have anything to put in it? My idea: replace the obsolete items with sculptures.

Both of your works deal with structures that shape our everyday lives while remaining largely invisible. What does it mean for you to make them visible?
Ben: I consider the loss of visibility of social processes and cohesions to be the defining characteristic of our time. It has an enormous impact on society, and on art in particular. As an artist who thinks in images, it is quite challenging to create a visual reflection of a world for which there is virtually no real-world image anymore. At the same time, that is exactly why I find it so exciting to experience the present as an artist.

Pascal: The company register is not secret. Every line in it is public. What you cannot see is the whole: you can read any company, but only one at a time, so you never see where they all sit. Making it visible means turning that sum into a picture. A sheet shows how many names share one address, and how dark the page gets is the measure. You see in a second, from the pavement, what took months to read.

You both describe your work as a form of documentation. Where do you see the line between documenting and commenting?
Ben: Art matters in the marginal areas, where contexts are elusive and defy verbal expression. The idea of art as commentary makes me rather queasy. Yet art is, by its very nature, always a document of its time. That is why I find the term “documenting” more appropriate.
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