Henrik Langsdorf

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA and Kassel/Germany

Artist statement

I make work about what survives human intervention. In collage and video, I look at the afterlife of materials, the built environment, and power structures after the original intentions behind them disintegrate. I work primarily with photographs from places I have lived: buildings and people in Kinshasa, mushrooms near my parents’ home in Germany, and plastic waste found in New York. In the “Deep Space” series, I combine these disparate elements and alter their scale: fungi and plastic bags become enormous, while buildings shrink to a small, almost fragile size. “Plasticenic” is a body of work where I combine inverted plastic bags with abstract shapes that I paint over. It reflects on the idea that plastic is becoming part of the geological record of the future. My video work turns to a different kind of aftermath: the overlooked colonial history of my native Germany in Africa and its enduring legacy in present-day Germany. Other works look at failed architectural utopias and the prosaic realities they leave in their wake. What connects these works is an interest in how human interventions leave scars, and how those scars transform and acquire new meanings over time.

Artwork