Astrid: Your work blends personal and shared stories. Can you share any specific stories or people that inspired your latest pieces, and how you've included these in your art?

C&G: In all our bodies of work up to this point, we were researching, collecting and interpreting the narratives of people and places. We were looking into identity and how our collective history and socio-cultural surroundings shape us. This approach has allowed us to meet amazing people and places, but also came with a responsibility towards those whom we portrayed.

In contrast to our past series, this body of work does not have such a narrative. It does not tell the personal stories of its protagonists, nor is it bound to one origin or place alone. Instead, our objective was to look within, to dissect our own inner belief system, our own inner personas. To allow ourselves to play and to create freely, with ourselves as the only point of reference.

The series has developed into a surrealistic play starring a cast of our personified fears and beliefs, a colourful celebration of our inner daemons and goddesses. The figures in the works take on a life of their own – they inhabit their own landscapes, and dwell in their own mind maze, just how we, as humans, live within our own constructed narrative, and often a very narrow understanding of ourselves. Being human is complex. The Sirens are our celebration of this complexity; They are huge, they are vulnerable, there is pain, there is play, there is transgression and there is transformation.

Astrid: How have recent events shaped your new work? Was there a particular moment or experience that guided this series?

C&G: I think question number 1 answers this one as well!

Astrid: Your collages have a very tactile, almost touchable feel. How does the material of the original collages affect the visual impact, and how does texture help express your subjects?

C&G: The collage technique is something we have been working with since the beginning of our collaboration almost 20 years ago. There are several reasons why we got seduced by it.

On the narrative level, it enables us to put together seemingly unrelated parts, creating references and draw up a story within one single image. To combine many moments into one.

On the physical, tactile level, we can use different materials, as an extension to our photographic base. Some parts of the images are printed on paper, some are painted, some are printed on fabric. There is lots of sewing and stitching, there are strings and other objects attached. In the end, all these different materials and expressions come together to create a strangely homogenous whole.

Compositionally, collage allows us to enlarge photographic body parts and exaggerate proportions unapologetically, yet with integrity. It allows the Siren to take up the whole picture frame with her giant thigh, or to hold up a protective mask with her many arms.

Astrid: You often use historical and cultural references in your work. How does your upcoming exhibition connect with or differ from your past works in the way you interpret history?

C&G: This series is an ongoing series, which we have been working on for the past three years. The overall title of it actually is HYSTERIA, Hysteria originally stemming from Greek meaning the womb, being coined in the 19th century to describe a psychological ailment or craziness befalling only women, and today being synonymous with emotional overreaction, mostly for women. Thematically we work with the repertoire of personas we all have within us, our fears and our grandeur, our goddesses and our daemons – the good the bad, the whimsical and the profound. When we started to delve into this, we got to think about famous Greek mythology, where the different Gods and Goddesses were celebrated for, or despite, their often complicated characters. Hysteria for us became synonymous with the outburst of emotion that these Greek Gods were known and worshiped for, with their grandeur and fallibility. If we want to embrace ourselves as the complicated being we are, with the “good” and the “bad”, the Gods and Goddesses of this ancient mythology lent themselves as a canvas, or reference, if you will.

As for the name, since the series is not yet finished, we have decided to give different names to each exhibition we create along the way towards the finished series, highlighting different angles within the body of work.

Also, we love to work with titles that leave space for interpretation and have more than one meaning. Both for us as the creators, but also for the audience, the viewer, the one seeing and perceiving the works, the title should not be an explination, but rather an emotional place from where to perceive the works. Take the title “Sirens” for example. A siren can be both – that, which warns you from danger, and the danger itself. The dichotomy itself is the question we ask. It is the space between these two opposite meanings, that creates the realm for the project to unfold. Is she dangerous? Is she well meaning? And for whom? Can she be both, the saviour and the destroyer? And is that not the two sides of the same coin?

Astrid: Photography plays a central role in your art. How do you approach the relationship between photography and other mediums in your creative process?

Our work emerges out of the notion that we perceive the world through filters, shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, and our socio-cultural environment. In that sense, we believe that we see the world not just with our eyes, but that we perceive it with all our senses, and more importantly, filtered by our experiences.

That is why we will perceive a person whose history and story we have followed or shared, differently, then someone who sees this person for the first time. In other words: the world around us is not the objective realm of things we think it is, but rather, an ever-changing kaleidoscopic dance of continuous impressions and interpretations.

In that way we have found photography somewhat restrictive to what we want to express in an image. It restricts us to what our eyes can see at a certain moment of time. But this is not how our human perception, intuition, memory or emotions work, where we filter, forget, enlarge, staple and cut memory and time together in nonlinear ways. In our work, we want to visibly include those non-physical aspects: We extend, supplement, deconstruct and layer our images.

That said, photography allows us to collect those many elements and moments in time; the details of a beautiful fabric, the wallpaper of a house, pages of a favourite book, a persons’ portrait and a persons’ memory. And photography, as opposed to painting, contains that grain of reality, and that is interesting to us. In some ways, it transfers the touchable world into the picture frame, as an effigy of our physical reality.

Astrid: As artists, how do you see the evolving landscape of digital and physical editions impacting your work in the future?

C&G: Our work has always been based on collage and combining different mediums with photography, creating our specific artistic expression, but up until this series, the collages were ephemeral, temporary tableaus that we then photographed to create our photographic prints. Coming from photography, we have worked with limited edition prints from the start.

With this body of work, we for the first time make our collage process into a permanent unique piece. We still photograph the works, keeping our artistic tradition with a limited number of edition prints per image. However, the original collages now live on as artworks in their own right. It is those we will be showing at Larsen Warner.

Astrid: What role do your editions play in making your art more accessible, and how do you balance this with maintaining exclusivity?

C&G: Coming from photography, we have always kept our editions limited to maintain the integrity and exclusivity of the work. A very tight selection of prints we make available as small, unframed prints in a larger edition to make the work a bit more accessible in a very regulated way.

/Astrid Birnbaum