Hans Diernberger, Statement

The feeling of purity is key to my work. To me, it is the eternal question of who you are and what you do. Can one ever be "one"? How do I invite visitors to enter and change my work without losing site of my needs for creating it? While seeing it, they are becoming a part of it. My presence in the picture could be swapped with anybody else´s. I see myself in the picture not only as an individual, but also as a person anybody else could be, because in the picture something happens that has no individual connotation. "I is another“, Arthur Rimbaud once said. You cannot be an individual, because you are always someone else, too.

After I finished high school I went straight to the army, just because I thought it might be an interesting experience to actually experience it, not just to talk about it. As a boy in Germany, after high school you have to choose between army and social work, both last nine to ten months. I was fascinated about the "experiment" of the army, because it was like living in this parallel-world that has nothing to do with the ordinary life i lived before. Besides, it set the stage for my future experiments of removing "self" from habit. I wanted this change in my life, and I wanted to see what the world was like somewhere else. Even though I was deeply troubled by some aspects of being in the army I think it was the right thing to do. It taught me to be strong and self-controlled and it gave me the opportunity to meet people i would have never met otherwise. Now, almost five years later, I realize that this decision was just the beginning of a series of decisions to remove myself from a fixed sense of self. Self imposed displacement would become key not only to my impulse to make work but how I open up its structure to others. While the core of my pieces comes from my experiences, I set up events, happenings and spectacles which in real time demonstrate experience to others, inviting others to write with me a biography.

For me, it was always of great importance to do something with real people who have real feelings, which is why I never fancied using only one media to do art. Rather, I used the media that was best suited to facilitate interactions and participation with other people. This is why I am very open to use new technologies and methods. Some of the methods I used for my work include the following: Photography, performance, video, sculpture, installation, drawing, outside projects. Also, once I was a rocket at the German Airspace Center (DLR).

Caspar David Friedrich, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, Ulay + Abramovich strongly influenced my work, but if i should name artists who really speak to my heart I would name Marcel Dzama and Paul Thek.