In her artistic practice, Yana Tsegay is interested in the question of how culture as a practice produces society, how it is disseminated, perceived and appropriated. In doing so, the artist works with a wide variety of media and materials, such as painting, spatial installation, performances, or image archives. The concept of painting is also broadly defined. Rather unusual materials such as skins, hides, pitch, wax, or sugar appear in her paintings; some objects, such as the Carrier Bag, are made entirely of them. Even to the simplest question: what do we see here, sculpture or painting? - the Amber Shopper refuses to answer. The focus is on the materials. They become carriers of meaning and history and point beyond their iconographic representation to the relationship and superimposition of history and fiction.

Her solo exhibition "The Amber Room," which she showed in Berlin in 2019, explicitly referred in its title to the legendary Amber Room, which has been considered lost since the end of World War II. The exhibition featured window frames with fly screens on which molten sugar was used to paint, as well as objects cast from sugar and resin. Yana overlays the supposedly objective story of a state room that was made of pure amber with her own ideas of what it might have looked like. She taps the story for its fictional parts and finds them. She recognizes the social construction of reality and how hegemonic power relations emerge from it. Why should one not also appropriate this mechanism and tell one's own counter-narratives, reshape them and experiment with them?

In her theoretical thesis From the Stone Age to the Present - Cave Allegories and Art Criticism, Yana already Yana dealt with George Bataille's question about the origin of culture and the human being. She doubted the idea that culture and painting can be traced back to a clearly locatable origin, as Bataille famously famously assumes. Especially painting and art, according to Yana's idea, must always be understood as part of a fluid and fictive history. It is important to her that painting not only be understood as something that relates to a Western, canonical art history, but can also incorporate other references. The cave paintings exemplify such a fictitious point of reference. Here, too, it becomes visible that they the one hand, they mark the completely different, on the other hand - as part of history - they are not protected from fictive from fictitious appropriations. Countering this, as well as any kind of hegemonic interpretation pattern, with her own reading was also a motif of Höhlenhotel Kappadokia, which Yana showed in Berlin in 2018; the title of the work at the same time a real place that the artist appropriates in her practice.

The use of styles, titles, contexts, or roles, as exemplified in her performance as the museum director of the fictitious institution The White Hut (2020), is a method of her work that is constantly being exercised and tested anew in order to better understand the ambivalence of appropriation and recognition. On the one hand appropriation is a necessary component of all social, cultural, and artistic practices, (just imagine, that for every word you say you have to say from whom you learned it) and of central importance, to make the new visible. On the other hand, Yana's works always refer to the unresolvable dialectic of recognition and cultural appropriation of recognition and cultural appropriation.

The exploration of tipping processes, the fine line between recognition and appropriation, between the visible and the invisible, what is said and what is not said, between the objective and the subjective and the invisible, what is said and what is not said, between the objective and the subjective, between history and fiction, is a central motif in Yana's artistic work. She wants to irritate the self-evident the complex and ethical questions of recognition and cultural appropriation into the political realm. political - admittedly with aesthetic means. This was especially the case with The White Hut, which as an aesthetic intervention in terms of structural racism in the art world. Despite this committed attitude, Yana's works never appear with a raised forefinger. She also refrains from pathos. She can rely on her own aesthetic means. Reflection, e.g. on the moral dimension of artistic recognition and cultural appropriation, Yana's works of art only emerge as the result of aesthetic reflection, not because the artist has not because the artist is rubbing the subject in the viewers' noses. It is a thoughtful, at times hermetic, sometimes hermetic, even mocking, way of working that always envelops her artworks in a certain enigmatic character.

Text: Leon Joskowitz

The catalog for the exhibition can be ordered via KVTV shop