Anna-Lena Dauber

Artist Statement

In my artistic practice, I explore the materiality of the everyday both within private and urban spaces. I am interested in matter not as passive substance, but as something that constitutes a dense web of relations, in which all entities are already entangled. From collected fragments, I create sculptures, photographs, digital collages, paintings, and sound works—assemblages that operate as agents in their own right. They articulate a reality that is not separate from us, but continuously co-produced with us.

Through processes of assemblage and transformation, excerpts of daily life gain an autonomous presence. Familiar distinctions—between subject and object, stillness and motion—begin to dissolve. I am particularly drawn to plastic as a defining material of our time: sterile, familiar, and strangely alien. It does not simply represent, but reflects the viewer’s own projections back onto them.

My work unfolds within what could be described as an ecological condition—not in the sense of a theme, but as a mode of being. Following a line of thought close to Timothy Morton, the ecological is understood as a state of radical interconnectedness, where boundaries between entities become porous and unstable.

Chance and material agency act as co-creators in my process; I work in resonance with their inherent tendencies. Engaging with New Materialist thought, I explore how things are not defined through fixed categories, but through dynamic relations. The human, in this sense, is not outside of matter, but part of its ongoing transformations—and it is precisely from within this condition that the possibility of acting, ethically and artistically, emerges.