Perception, Plausibility and Constructed Reality

My work begins with a simple observation: what we see and what is real are not necessarily the same thing.

Under the title Wahrgenommenes, I explore how perception constructs reality. I work with photographs of situations and places I have encountered myself, but I do not treat photography as evidence of an objective world. Instead, I reconstruct these images through montage, repetition, temporal layers, altered perspectives and subtle disruptions of spatial logic.

The resulting works often appear plausible at first glance. Only through closer observation do contradictions emerge. Elements connect that cannot coexist, different moments occupy the same space, perspectives shift, people disappear while their traces remain. I am interested in precisely this moment: when perception has already accepted an image before thought begins to question it.

This is the common thread running through my work. The individual series use different visual strategies, but they return to the same question: How much of what we call reality is actually constructed by our own perception?

This question has gained a new urgency through generative AI. Images can now be produced that are highly plausible without ever having had a corresponding moment in reality. For me, this does not make photography obsolete. It exposes something fundamental about seeing itself: plausibility and truth are not the same thing.

My works are not AI-generated. Their starting point is lived reality — something I have seen, experienced and photographed myself. I then deliberately destabilise this photographic reference through construction. This distinction is central to my practice: the image does not invent an experience that never existed; it transforms an experienced reality in order to question how reality is perceived.

I understand the work as an encounter between two perceptions: the artist’s way of seeing and the viewer’s. I do not want to prescribe a single interpretation, but neither do I consider meaning arbitrary. The works create a structured uncertainty — a space in which seeing, expectation, memory and knowledge begin to contradict one another.

Images have never been reality.

What is new is that we can no longer afford to forget it.