Sascha Pohle is a visual artist working in Amsterdam and Düsseldorf. He graduated from the the Städelschule in Frankfurt and from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2007 and has since exhibited extensively in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Taiwan, South Korea and China.
Drawing from various film and art historical references, Sascha Pohle mimics, reinterprets and deals with stereotypical representations of our visual culture, built through collections, memories and cultural appropriations. His practice spans a broad range of media including film, photography and installation. For many years he investigates the themes of identity challenging the complex concept of authenticity, issues of authorship, fact and fiction, original and copy. „When I was a kid I wanted to become an actor. Instead I became an artist intrigued by seeing others re-enacting and seeing myself acting as a re-enactor.“
In a lot of Pohle’s recent work packaging and containerization plays a leading role. Left-over objects of daily use, commodities and (media) artifacts become represented in a new time / space context and are imbued with historical evocations. By a (subjective) scrambling, rearrangement and spatial displacement of artifacts Pohle addresses how memories contain or are themselves contained.
Sascha Pohle's point of departure for his residency at IFP focusses on the process of receiving and returning of flowers on the background of gift economy theories. Although archaic reciprocal rituals of gift giving became mostly replaced by the currency of money, various aspects and hybrid forms of exchange still coexist in our contemporary societies, where commodity relations and gift relations are not always clearly distinguishable. During his research Pohle wants to further understand expressions of guanxi in China. Often having used discarded supporting structures and packaging in his art, how could a remainder of a previous flower gift be adapted as a reflection upon the status of objets and social relationships?
The residency of Sascha Phole is supported by Mondriaan Fonds
