ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daniel Kuge is a German artist of South Korean descent whose practice reflects on civilizational legacies and perspectives of a distant future. Working across film, painting, sculpture, sound, and photography, Kuge has presented his work at renowned film festivals and international exhibition venues, including the Braunschweig International Film Festival, Shoot the Lobster (New York City), The Wrong Biennale, Kunsthalle Kohta Helsinki, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Temporary Gallery Cologne, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, and the Mönchehaus Museum Goslar.
Kuge has received numerous grants and distinctions. He is a NEUSTART KULTUR fellow of the Stiftung Kunstfonds, was shortlisted for the Kunstpreis Junger Westen and Nordwestkunst awards, and is a recipient of a Förderpreis from the GROSSE Kunstausstellung NRW. He completed his studies in Visual Communication and Fine Art in Düsseldorf and Braunschweig, Germany. His professors and mentors include Michael Brynntrup, Frances Scholz, Hartmut Neumann, Kota Ezawa, Jan Verwoert, Schirin Kretschmann, Gunnar Friel, Christian Jendreiko, Uwe J. Reinhardt, and Gerhard Vormwald.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Daniel Kuge's artistic works are speculations about how future generations might view our technological society and remains of human achtivities. How are anthropogenic traces, industrial artifacts, and the relationship between humans and their objects read and interpreted? How does mankind inscribe itself into the world with their objects and machines? Kuge simulates the perspective of a posterity. Unclear which time, unclear which knowledge, unclear whether humanoid. Archeology from a future perspective. Decoding and interpretation of legacies for which the language, instructions and context have not survived.
Formations formed by angular bodies that keep their contexts, origins, relationships and meanings hidden behind sterile surfaces. Locating the reference points at a singular point in space and time becomes more difficult and leads to a simultaneity of past, present and future. They oscillate between a structual component and a cult object, between micro and macro, between monumentality and silence, between the material and the virtual.
The starting point for Daniel Kuge's art is his work on an image archive, which the artist has been working on for over 15 years and which includes around 20,000 photos, technical drawings, information graphics and other visualizations. His own photos are added to the structure, research on images, rearranging and transfering into a film, a painting or an object. The first impetus can come from an everyday object or a childhood memory. It can bear something mysterious, grotesque, sublime or dreamlike or even shift into the uncanny. It can tell about human actions and refer to something ritual. It can tell of the past, but also contain something present or future. It can reveal sadness and harshness. It can report about perfection, but also about failure. It can have an elegance but also an ugliness. It can be part of the collective memory, but also part of its own world.