The work Lost & Found is based on an original poster from Berlin’s image campaign, featuring the slogan „Wo sich verlieren und sich finden ein und dieselbe Sache sind“ (Where losing oneself and finding oneself are one and the same thing.)” The poster serves as a base for a relief-like assemblage of tablets in various sizes, shapes and colours. These are arranged partly in order, partly irregularly across the poster surface and within the lettering, creating a tension between structure and loss of control. The combination of advertising language and medical symbolism addresses ‘losing oneself’ and ‘finding oneself’ as parallel states. At the same time, the work references Berlin’s cultural self-staging, where the motif of losing oneself is closely linked to club culture and economic interests. In this context, medication appears ambivalently, symbolising both healing, dependency and regulation

The Poland-born multimedia artist Kurt von Bley explores questions of identity and memory in his sculptural and installation-based practice. His works reference religious imagery, totalitarian pasts, as well as biographical experiences of trauma and exclusion. By transforming and alienating everyday objects with historical and autobiographical associations, he destabilises established narratives. In his series on medical aesthetics, tablets are removed from their functional context and experienced as ambivalent carriers of social, therapeutic, and economic meanings.

Website
@kurtvonbley