Set the Pigeons Free / Standing Someone Up [fàng gē zī] (2024-2025)

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Installation view
Ad-hoc Exhibition, Class of Julika Rudelius, University of the Arts Bremen, 2026

Installation view
Hochschultage 2025, University of the Arts Bremen, 2025

Set the Pigeons Free / Standing Someone Up [fàng gē zī] (2024-2025)

HD 3-channel video
1 x 09’ 52”, 2 x 07’ 54” (Version of the male figure)
1 x 15’ 36”, 2 x 07’ 54” (Version of the female figure)

The starting point of this video work is the ambiguity of its title: Set the Pigeons Free can be read both as an act of liberation and as a gesture of abandonment. Likewise, Standing Someone Up refers to a sudden departure, a failure to appear, an act of withdrawal—a movement of rupture and displacement. This semantic duality forms the conceptual foundation of the work, extending into its visual and auditory structure.

The artist assembles image fragments from China and Germany, oscillating between the everyday and the uncanny. In this fragmented space, ruins, animal carcasses, artificial artifacts, and urban scenes enter into an unstable dialogue—they exist simultaneously as familiar relics and as disruptive foreign bodies. The montage is not merely a formal method but also reflects the unstable relationship between memory, place, and identity.

In parallel, passages from Julia Kristeva’s texts on abjection are recited in fragments by a disembodied voice. The language does not assume a didactic role in relation to the images but unfolds as an independent presence—it confronts, withdraws, repeats, and overlaps with the visual layers. Here, abjection is not merely a theoretical concept but an experience that moves on the threshold between attraction and repulsion.

Through the combination of these elements, a tension emerges between detachment and attachment, between structure and dissolution. The work invites the viewer to experience the instability of meaning—one that can neither be fully grasped nor entirely resolved—a state of in-betweenness, of constant shifting.

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