FROM CAPITALISM WITH LOVE - CENSORSHIP CHINA

In 2016, I created the series „from capitalism with love“. The series came to life as he has been strongly affected by the topic of capitalism and its negative impact on society. The deeper I immersed myself in the topic, the more it struck me how capitalism affects particularly western societies and I couldn’t stop thinking about this for quite some time.
In my opinion, capitalism basically is a good system, if only it was run “correctly”. In my eyes, our western society has lost itself more and more in its own greed and misused the originally “good” system through speculation and deprivation which directly led to a gap between classes and other consequences described in this series.

In the 13-part series, the number 13 was consciously chosen as it often comes with the notion of bad fortune, which is aimed to reinforce the negative effect of greed in capitalism. The main aim is to make people reflect but without shocking them or make them turn in disgust. This part is very important and also some sort of “balancing act” as the limit of provocation is reached at a different point for everyone. Also, the images are held “clean” for a reason – it’s about making the different topics easily accessible without visual overflow which might restrict the thinking process. Therefore, I primarily focuse on topics which are well known from the media, such as blood diamonds in Africa and other more current issues.

It was important for me to show one particular fact: people are already aware of what is going on! It’s definitely not rocket science to point this out to people and it’s also not the intention of this series BUT many people simply accept these negative consequences without batting an eye, mainly because they are scared to lose their own prosperity and/or satisfying their greed already became an essential part of their life. The human being clearly puts its needs over the need of the entire species– and over planet earth as a whole. This is the main issue I want to point out: there is deep awareness among humans of these issues – but also zero motivation to bring about change. As you know an image often has a stronger effect than words, but only when a topic possesses a certain visual strength it’s possible to affect the consciousness of the observer and bring about change. Therefore, this topic was visually explored in my typical, conceptual style, with the hope to create “a new clientele of conscious thought” and create the wish in the observer to be part of that.