Every identity must be or wants to be proven - from the innermost to the outside through the ways in which one expresses and adorns one's self, and from the outermost to the inside through documents within a bureaucracy that identify one as something and assign it the status of legitimate existence. The two influence each other, and even the emancipation from them - the attempted overcoming of the one in favour of the other, the fixed in favour of the mobile - remains determined by the identitary logic that structures them. This logic asserts: Identities are fixed, irrevocably you are who you are as a result of birth, origin, social environment, gender, sex, character, consumer behaviour, housing situation, credit rating, etc. Even in the attempt to overcome them, one remains subject to these principles, one has only changed the point of reference. The structure in which a self and its environment are conceived is still the same: characterised by blood, soil and everything that can be placed on it.

Specters brings together works that focus on this dynamic. At the centre is an old ancestral passport - a historical document from my great-grandfather's estate, which was intended to provide detailed proof of the so-called "Aryan descent" of parts of his family and which was mandatory for all citizens of the German Reich between 1933-45. Digitised, this passport forms the material basis for the series of black reliefs, which show excerpts from a composite photograph of all double pages, and the triptych of large-format prints created by photographing the reflections on the surface of the reliefs. In the photographic enlargement, individual fragments of writing become visible, into which the camera simultaneously inscribes the silhouettes and shadows of figures and rooms. The passport entries, almost distorted into ornament, also recur in the series of wooden grids, but there as negatives in which the writing has been cut out. The ornament in relation to the self also reappears in the paintings - a backpack with the Hogwarts emblem is decorated with key rings, and the cut-outs from photo tiles result in an abstract and fragmented face that turns a smartphone lens towards the viewer. The ancestor passport itself lies as part of a sculpture on an armchair from the 1920s, opened up under a plate of cherry cake, as if people had been cheerfully leafing through it at the five o’clock tea and didn't want to clean up afterwards.

Stuart Hall understood identity as a concept "under erasure". Identity would actually denote something closer to an ongoing process of identification: all identities must be constantly updated, refreshed - we must regularly tell ourselves similar stories, look at ourselves in the mirror, situate ourselves in the social sphere; we must also regularly renew our ID cards, be checked by the police and go through customs at the airport. We have to constantly identify ourselves and allow ourselves to be identified, and yet that which can be temporarily grasped as the product of these identifications is regarded as fixed. In this sense, Hall understood the concept of identity as under erasure: we use it even though it has long ceased to be adequate for what it describes. It is a shadow, a ghost, a specter that haunts the present.