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2021, Friendly Capitalism Lounge, NEUROTITAN, Berlin, Germany
2021, donation initiative ÄGGF/BZgA/DeutscheAidshilfe x BeateUhseBag
n=100
n = 100 (ongoing since 2019) is a long-term series of silkscreen prints based on discarded plastic shopping bags collected from around the world. Each bag is reproduced as a unique print, transforming an ephemeral object of everyday consumption into a permanent visual record.
The title refers to the statistical notation n, denoting a representative sample size in scientific research. By limiting the project to one hundred bags, the series proposes a cross-section of global consumer culture rather than an exhaustive archive. International corporations, regional supermarkets, luxury brands, and anonymous local retailers coexist within the work, revealing the visual language through which commerce shapes everyday experience across cultures.
While plastic bags are designed as disposable objects, they often become unexpected souvenirs. Carried home from journeys, preserved after memorable purchases, or kept as practical reminders of a particular place, they quietly record personal encounters with cities, countries, and cultures. Like postcards or ticket stubs, they bear witness to movement, memory, and the rituals of travel. In n = 100, these humble objects are elevated from transient packaging to cultural artifacts, each carrying both an individual biography and a broader narrative of globalization.
Drawing on the traditions of the readymade, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art, the series explores the intersection of design, branding, and material culture. Removed from their original function and translated into the language of silkscreen—a medium historically associated with both commercial reproduction and artistic practice—the bags become portraits of economic systems, cultural identities, and patterns of exchange. Their folds, traces of wear, and signs of use preserve the evidence of lived experience while reflecting the environmental consequences of contemporary consumption.
The series begins with the iconic Aldi shopping bag, designed in the early 1970s by the German artist Günter Fruhtrunk (1923–1982). Often described as Germany's "most famous unknown artwork," the bag demonstrates how modernist abstraction entered everyday life through commercial design. Its inclusion establishes the conceptual framework of the project: an exploration of the fluid boundaries between art, design, commerce, and daily experience.
As an evolving body of work, n = 100 functions simultaneously as an archive, a collection of contemporary relics, and a meditation on the objects that accompany us through our lives. By preserving plastic bags in the enduring medium of silkscreen, the series asks how value is assigned to everyday things and how seemingly insignificant objects can become carriers of memory, place, and collective cultural history.
In this series of miniature sculptures, chewed gum — a material of fleeting, bodily intimacy — is transfigured into permanence through the casting of Chromium-Cobalt-Molybdenum alloy, an industrial metal known for its use in prosthetics and dental applications. What begins as a soft, disposable remnant of everyday consumption is solidified into an enduring relic, merging the organic gesture of the mouth with the precision of metallurgical craft.
The process captures a moment of transformation from the ephemeral to the eternal: traces of human presence become sculptural fossils. The gum’s original elasticity, shaped by the unconscious choreography of chewing, is translated into metallic form, preserving the imprints of touch, pressure, and rhythm. Each object becomes a record of an intimate performance — a personal, bodily act rendered in the language of industrial production.
Skateboard Stories is an artistic investigation into the life cycle of a used skateboard and the narrative embedded within its traces. Over a period of eight months, a single pre-stickered skateboard was passed among different riders, each using it within their own habitual environment. The board served as a shared medium—an instrument of movement and expression—while simultaneously recording the marks, impacts, and abrasions of collective use.
Each trick performed left subtle evidence of encounter: the gradual erosion of color, the layering of scratches, the fading of surface gloss. These transformations were documented photographically and became the foundation for a silkscreen edition. Three specific moments—beginning, middle, and end—were selected to form a triptych at the original scale of the skateboard deck, encapsulating the visual and temporal evolution of the object.
You Are Not Here
You Are Not Here is a multimedia installation that explores the paradoxical relationship between physical presence and mental absence. It reflects on the human capacity to inhabit multiple places simultaneously: while the body remains anchored in one location, memory, imagination, longing, and thought continually travel elsewhere. The work considers this uniquely human ability to transcend the immediate present through the mind, questioning what it means to truly "be" somewhere.
Developed during an artist residency in Mexico City, the project originated from an unexpected encounter. At a flea market, Tobias Molitor discovered a vintage postcard depicting a place already removed from its original context. The postcard—an object historically intended to bridge geographical distance through image and message—became the conceptual point of departure for the work. While living abroad, the artist repeatedly found himself thinking of home, mentally drifting away from his immediate surroundings. In one of these moments of self-awareness, he caught himself and silently remarked: you are not here. This simple sentence became both the title and the conceptual core of the installation.
The work unfolds in two interconnected layers. The first is the found postcard itself, an object that already carries associations of travel, nostalgia, memory, and mediated experience. The second layer is the artist's handwritten phrase, you are not here, reproduced on eighty duplicated versions of the original postcard. The handwritten intervention transforms an anonymous found image into a personal reflection while simultaneously inviting viewers to project their own experiences of displacement, absence, and longing onto the work.
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Installed on a rotating postard display stand commonly found in tourist shops, the postcards occupy an ambiguous space between artwork, souvenir, and mass-produced commodity. The display invites viewers to browse, rotate, and encounter the work as they would in a commercial setting, subtly questioning the relationship between tourism and genuine presence. In an age of global mobility and constant digital connectivity, the installation suggests that travel does not necessarily guarantee presence, just as remaining in one place does not prevent the mind from wandering elsewhere.
Accompanying the postcard installation is a neon light sculpture reproducing the handwritten phrase you are not here. The illuminated text extends the work beyond the printed object, functioning as a persistent reminder that these moments of mental displacement occur regardless of time—during day or night, in moments of movement as well as stillness. The glowing script possesses both the immediacy of a personal note and the visual language of urban signage, oscillating between intimate confession and public statement.
Art historically, You Are Not Here resonates with traditions of conceptual art, text-based practices, and the use of found objects. It engages with the legacy of artists who employ language as both image and idea, while also drawing on the everyday aesthetics of the postcard as a cultural artifact. The work situates itself within contemporary discussions surrounding mobility, migration, tourism, and the increasingly fragmented experience of presence in a globally connected world. It acknowledges that our perception of place is never solely determined by geography but is continually shaped by memory, imagination, and emotional attachment.
Rather than presenting absence as a deficiency, You Are Not Here proposes it as an intrinsic condition of contemporary existence. The installation invites viewers to reflect on the fluid boundaries between here and elsewhere, presence and absence, reality and imagination, suggesting that these states are not opposites but coexist continuously within human consciousness.
