Joas Nebe is an artist, curator, and academic with a background in psychology, media studies, literature, and theatre from the University of Hamburg. He also trained in traditional art techniques at a private art school. After graduating, Nebe lectured on film analysis at Hamburg University and analyzed advertising campaigns for Reemtsma. Since 2000, he has worked as an artist and freelance curator, with projects shown in Berlin, Milan, and Tehran. Notable exhibitions include “Climate Change Cartoons” at the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference in Durban and “Machine Fair” at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012. His films have been featured in international festivals such as Les Instants Video in Cairo, Videoformes Festival, Sustain Our Africa, Madatac in Madrid, and Papy Gyros Nights in Hong Kong. Nebe’s work has been shown at the Biblioteca Alexandrina, ART_TECTURE, and SHIFT:ibpcpa’s “In 24hours: Future Visions.” He has received numerous awards, stipends, and residencies from various countries, contributing to his diverse artistic perspective and body of work.

Joas Nebe – Portrait

https://joasnebe.art | https://www.instagram.com/joas.nebe | https://www.x.com/JSNebe

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“It’s a never-ending game of disintegration. I challenge the viewer by not living up to his or her expectations. I am denying the satisfaction of solving the riddle, hidden within the depth of my artwork.” By turning his filmic cabinet of curiosity into an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of hybrid geometric patterns, Joas Nebe teases the viewer into accessing his game. He believes: “Riddle games of this kind spark creativity and pass on the role of the artist to the viewer.”

Painting, 80 x 80 cm, 1995 © Joas Nebe

-1.Your background in psychology, media studies, and literature seems to add unique dimensions to your artistic practice. How do you see these fields influencing your approach to both creating and interpreting art?

**Psychology and Media Studies deal with human behavior as well as its manipulation. Accordingly, one of my main topics is interpersonal communication. Without diving into philosophical depths, I believe that the ability to understand each other is not necessarily given in every case, rather in the rarest cases, or simply never. We often communicate with each other without that communication having any real meaning. We communicate just to communicate. We exist because we speak. This is the main theme of my work.**

-2.Your work frequently tackles deeply political themes, from ideological communication to historical erasures. In what ways do you see art serving as a medium for political commentary, and how do you balance the abstraction in your work with the clarity of the political message you wish to convey?

I am deeply shaped by the political experiences of my grandparents, both on my mother’s and father’s sides. Both families had to survive the two German dictatorships. One side of the family was terrorized by the Communists, the other by the Nazis. My mother’s father, my grandfather, was an architect who worked for a large firm that was somewhat sympathetic to the dictatorship. As an architect, he was assigned by the THW (Technical Relief Agency) in Königsberg to operations in Hamburg and Berlin after the bombings, where he had to pull both dead and living people from damaged air-raid shelters. Later, the Russians sent him to a prison camp in Russia. He was held there for more than five years by the authorities because his architectural knowledge was needed for rebuilding the Soviet Union.

Both of my parents had experiences of fleeing. My grandmother was forced to flee Königsberg with my twelve-year-old mother and her two-year-old sister, while my grandfather was not allowed to leave the city and was taken into Russian captivity. My father also fled with both his parents from rural West Prussia, first to Danzig and then later further west. My mother, grandmother, and aunt ended up in the Saxon Erzgebirge. My grandmother, a musician who lived off her piano lessons, was forced by the Soviet occupiers to work in uranium mines. My mother, who later wanted to study art, was denied a place at university by the authorities of the newly established socialist dictatorship (the GDR) because she came from a bourgeois family.

Against this background, I have a deep distrust and strong aversion to any political ideology, whether it is from the right or the left. I see in every political concept, in every political movement, the seed of physical violence, threatening not only the political opponent but also anyone who stands in the way of one’s own political interests. For me, ideology leads to genocide.

**What interests me, therefore, are not ideologies themselves but the abstract dimension of how politics functions.**

One example of exploring the relationship between politics and violence is the video project “The Political Argument/Peace Talks” and “Relieve Me From Politics.” In “The Political Argument,” I use animated charcoal drawings, which are inherently politically charged due to their use by artists like Käthe Kollwitz or William Kentridge, to trace the path from rhetoric, commonplaces, and stereotypes of one population group towards another, to the outbreak of violent excess. 

In “Relieve Me From Politics,” a work held in the brightly colored visual world of children’s film animation, I look for images that reflect the influence of politics and politicians on different individuals and the individual forms of existence that make up society. 

So I use a specific narrative style—once, in the case of “Political Argument,” in line with what is usually associated with it, and once contrapuntally, in the case of “Relieve Me From Politics.” By working with the contexts in which narrative patterns and styles exist, I further charge the content, images, sound, and narrative, and suggest a certain interpretation. In this way, I manage—or so I believe—to escape a crude politicization of my art. For there is nothing less interesting and more redundant than political art. I refer here to the art of Arno Breker under the Nazis or to Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union.

-3. With your extensive experience, what insights have you gained about the relationship between visual media and communication? How do these insights inform your work as an artist?

**Visual communication—whether in the form of feature films, TV series, or commercials—works through narrative strategies that are also known as formats or genres.** We all learn these narrative forms over the course of our lives through the thousands of films, pictures, etc., that we see in the media. In the past, this applied mainly to cinema; today, it’s more about social media. Every format, which is often communicated in the advertising for a film or TV series, carries expectations about the plot and the elements, the characters being depicted. For example, we know when watching a romantic comedy roughly what will happen. The hero or heroine will meet the dream partner, fall in love. There will be complications until they finally come together, happily ever after…

As I mentioned in my previous response, I work on a meta-level with the narrative forms available to me as an artist. Often, I deliberately subvert these forms, using them in ways that defy the expectations they typically evoke in the viewer.

-4. Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career that significantly influenced your development as an artist? Was there a particular event or project that stands out as especially impactful or memorable in shaping your creative path?

**A key moment in my career was when two large tempera paintings were purchased by Stage Holding.** Stage Holding is an internationally operating entertainment company owned by Joop van den Ende. In the second half of the 1990s, van den Ende made a lot of money in television entertainment, which he then invested in acquiring licenses for Disney musical productions. In the early 2000s, he acquired a number of theaters in Germany and Europe and outfitted the foyers of these theaters with artworks by local artists. In Hamburg, Stage Holding took over the Hafen Theatre, a tent structure that they equipped with a permanent architectural framework. The foyer of the Hafen Theatre is about 2,000 square meters, with two bars at the balcony level. For these two bars, Stage Holding purchased two of my largest works, each measuring 2×3 meters.

This acquisition was the first major recognition I received from an acknowledged art collector. 

Painting, 250 x 300 cm, 1996 © Joas Nebe

-5. You’ve worked across several mediums, including video, installation, and more traditional forms of art. How do you decide which medium is best suited for a particular concept or project?

**Just as genres in cinema or formats in television are associated with certain historical and usage-related connotations, certain media are tied to specific associations.** Video, for example, has a close relationship to body art (e.g., the videos of Bruce Nauman). Outside the art world, the early use of video technology is closely associated with the porn industry. The breakthrough of VHS tapes in the late 1980s and 1990s was driven by their use on porn sets and their marketing to end consumers. There may be a connection to body art as an exploration of the physical condition of humanity, as a refusal or counter-movement to the aestheticization and automation of the sex act in pornography.

Today, however, the use of video technology is overlapped with other meanings, especially with its use in the amateur and influencer sectors. Shaky videos testify to authentic witness accounts at the scene of natural disasters or crimes.

I like to work with heavily altered source material in my videos. This leads to highly abstract video series like “The MTA Project“

I essentially “brush the medium against the grain.” I use it contrary to its historical use and contrary to the expectations viewers have of video art. Highly abstract images originally emerged from painting, such as with Gerhard Richter, but were also discovered very early on for film (e.g., by Hans Richter, an early namesake in the 1920s). By creating highly aestheticized abstract, moving forms accompanied by special sound constructions, I use the medium of video to refer back to painting or early film.

In contrast, painting exists in a completely different context. Due to its complex technical and material requirements, painting has never been suitable for eyewitness testimony. Painting has always transported and reinterpreted the stories of classical Greek mythology and the Bible. Later, artists like Goya with *The Third of May 1808* or *The Disasters of War*, and Delacroix with *Liberty Leading the People*, created metaphors for certain historical and political situations. Starting from an eyewitness account, the representations become symbolic images for specific historical contexts.

In this tradition, my series of large tempera paintings on burlap depict figures of various ethnicities, as they are typical in the street scenes of any large city, mixed with monsters—symbols for our time, our fears of each other, but also our tolerance of others.

-6. You explore the intersection of art, technology, and nature in your work. How do you see the role of AI in expanding or challenging the boundaries of artistic creativity, especially regarding the stereotypes and limitations it can perpetuate?

**AI as a technology is initially neutral. Every technology has its positive and negative sides, and this applies to AI as well. Photographer Boris Eldagsen, who won the Sony World Photography Award with an AI-generated image, said it comes down to the prompt you offer the AI. The creative artistic achievement shifts from composition to a linguistic level that has a technical dimension. Because prompts are, of course, not literature. To work successfully with prompts, one must understand the software’s functionality and use it in a way that serves one’s artistic goals.** 

As an artist, if I master the art of formulating prompts, I can expand my expressive range to a degree I might not easily achieve given my skills, which are usually limited to specific media.

-7.In your “Into the Void” series, you use collage techniques to depict erasures during the Stalinist era. How do you see the physical process of collage paralleling the metaphoric act of erasure in historical memory, and what role does medium play in conveying this narrative

**Working with found photographic material means, first of all, engaging with the perspectives of certain image producers. This is the basis of collage technique. I always use existing material, no matter how much I later alter it.** This is, so to speak, the fundamental trait of this technique and, at the same time, the inherent message of the medium.

When I cut out individual elements, such as figures, and place them in a different context, for example, in a specific landscape, I give the figure or landscape a new expression. What I did in “Into The Void” was to work with negative forms. I didn’t paste the cut-out figure into a new landscape but instead used the outline left behind in the original image as a symbol of “erasing the political opponent” in the truest sense of the word. In essence, I replicated on a technical level what the henchmen of the Stalin regime did in the Soviet Union when they scratched out the murdered from photos and even from negatives. Thus, I used the characteristic element of collage technique for the artistic interpretation of this monstrous, inhuman act, even though I reinterpreted it.

-8. Your project “Climate Change Cartoons” was showcased at the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference. What role do you believe art plays in addressing global issues such as climate change, and how can it foster meaningful dialogue around such critical topics?

In addition to “Climate Change Cartoons,”

 I have repeatedly explored the topic of climate change in my video work. One example is the video series “Atlantis,” in which I connect the myth of the lost continent—something that has only survived as a shadow in our memory, and whose actual existence remains uncertain—with the potential flooding of our coastal cities due to rising sea levels. 

Another video series is “Puddle of Dream.” This series addresses water scarcity and the unimaginable disappearance of rain, along with its remnants—puddles in which the world reflects. As children, puddles sparked our imagination because their fluid surface continually altered the reflections through movement. 

In these works, I focus on a side aspect, an otherwise insignificant element of possible change (“Puddle of Dreams”), or fears associated with climate change (“Atlantis”). I consciously avoided a didactic tone, which could lead the work back into political territory. In my opinion, this is something artists should avoid when addressing critical or societal issues. Major themes can only be tackled honestly and authentically by exploring their side aspects. Artists, in particular, often have the most experience with this and thus the right to approach such subjects.

-9. In the “MTA Project”, you draw an analogy between the human brain’s neurological structures and a city’s rapid transit network. How did this metaphor come about, and what do you hope viewers will take away from this comparison?

Just as in art, where different media I can use as an artist come with specific technical and cultural-historical prerequisites, so do our physiological and morphological conditions influence how we think. If the brain were constructed differently or made of other materials, we would think, speak, and feel differently. 

It is now known that certain areas of the brain are responsible for specific processing tasks. The visual cortex occupies a different region than the neurons responsible for processing smells or taste buds.

Another significant element in this video work is the process of learning new concepts. We tend to remember things and topics more easily when they relate to things we already know, in contrast to entirely unfamiliar subjects. In such cases, cognitive structures must first be built to which later experiences and knowledge can connect.

This process can be likened to the city’s subway and light rail system, with key transfer points where one can switch from one line to another. By drawing an analogy between the public transport network and brain processes, I reference the persistence of certain ideas, clichés, and entrenched expectations we repeatedly turn to because they are familiar. It’s difficult to break away from these unless we can transfer from one long-established knowledge connection to another, much like we transfer between subway lines at key stations.

In this context, I see the MTA Project as preliminary work for my exploration of the mechanics of political discourse. 

-10.Can you share what current projects you’re focusing on, and do you have any upcoming plans or future endeavors that you’re particularly excited about?

I am still developing the “Political Argument” theme and experimenting with different television formats to highlight specific aspects. In addition, I am excited about the collaboration with the ArtRewards Gallery in Oslo, which has been representing me for the past two months. We have since published an interview about my work on the gallery’s platform, which has received consistently positive feedback. 

https://artrewards.net/blog/joas-nebe

Thanks to this collaboration, my work is now featured on Artsy and Artmajeur and can be purchased through these platforms.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/joas-nebe

https://www.artmajeur.com/joas-nebe

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Image credits:

(C) 2024 all rights reserved by VG Bildkunst, Joas Nebe