Simon Wachsmuth
Antrepo No.3
Feriköy Greek School

Born in 1964, Hamburg. Lives in Berlin and Vienna.

Simon Wachsmuth researches blind spots and unexpected epilogues in the grand narratives of history and art history. He is interested in situations of ignorance and a fundamental lack of information, when knowledge about significant phenomenon is missing. His works often use an archival and pseudoscientific approach, and his restricted vocabulary of forms facilitates an openness that prompts the viewer to develop his/her own thoughts and associations.
The title of the site-specific project Parabasis (2009) refers to a point in ancient Greek drama when all of the actors leave the stage and the chorus addresses the audience directly, mostly expressing the author's view on political topics of the day. The artist has attempted to translate the parabasis form, which primarily operates with presence and speech, into the world of images, objects and their representations.
Parabasis starts at the oldest man-made place of worship, Göbekli Tepe, built in 10,000 bc, and finishes in 2005 at a site that turned out to be the oldest evidence of settlement in İstanbul, discovered during the construction of the Marmaray, an undersea rail tunnel between Europe and Asia. These prehistoric witnesses constitute an antipode to several important works of Western art, such as Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle in Arezzo (1447-1466), which tells the Legend of the True Cross by depicting the triumph of the Emperor Constantine, the founder of Constantinople, or the fragmented Gigantomachia - the Great Altar of Pergamon from the 2nd century bc in the Ancient Greek city of Pergamon (modern day Bergama in Turkey) in northwestern Anatolia. These works of art are taken as the starting point to launch a number of contentious issues relating to European and Turkish self-awareness and understanding.