Title:
Brown Goods: Sculptures

Year:
2020

Format:
Black Wings, 2020
2 Harley Davidson windshields 19 x 56 cm, 17 x 54 cm

Flight, 2020
2 Porsche windscreens with fake brass hanging mechanisms, 63x136cm (each)

Left Open, 2020
Mercedes windscreen with fake brass hanging mechanism, 58.5x52cm

Right Open, 2020
Mercedes windscreen with fake brass hanging mechanism, 73x58cm

Pipe Dreams, 2020
2 Harley Davidson exhaust pipes wrapped in recycled gold foil emergency blankets, 73x10x34cm

Okada, 2020
2 Puig windscreens, 37x30cm

The accompanying sculptures to the film “Brown Goods”, depict exhaust pipes from a Harley Davidson wrapped in gold rescue blankets, as if luxuriously gold plated.

Windows from a Mercedes car delicately hinge off a wall from fake brass brackets.

Windscreens from Porsche cars – one of the prominent symbols of wealth in Hamburg, hover somewhere in-between flight and futility.

These used automobile parts come together in a questioning orchestra of sorts, playing on notions of value.

Discarded by the “free world” and exported to developing countries like Nigeria where they are embraced wholeheartedly and take on new meaning: the promise of European luxury.

This same luxury is unafforded by the many West African migrants who cross the Atlantic in the hope of improved economic means, most ending up undocumented and degraded.

The sculptures reference this redundancy, reiterated in the immobility of their automobile components: powerful fragments reduced to mere art objects.