Johanna Maj Schmidt

Lives and works in Leipzig

Artist statement

I work across film and performance, as well as painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing, including theoretical and literary texts. My current research explores how digital forms of expression and infrastructures shape the ways we live together. I am interested in crossing epistemological boundaries—shifting between different ways of knowing and seeing. This also means moving between forms of expression and positions: those of the artist, researcher, and “political animal.” Rather than trying to reconcile these positions, I am interested in bringing the contradictions between their particular logics and desires into tension. Humour and exaggeration allow me to inhabit rather than resolve these contradictions. I also think of my works as existing in relation to one another. A film, painting, text, performance, or sculpture can stand on its own, but it can also become part of a larger constellation. Images, figures, and ideas reappear across works and change through repetition and new contexts. Earlier works can be absorbed by later ones, while other voices and practices can enter my own. In this respect, internet meme culture interests me not only as an object of research, but also as a way of thinking about artistic practice. Memes circulate from person to person, changing along the way and complicating the idea of authorship. My own practice similarly moves between collaboration and individual acts of commentary. I am interested in what happens when something is taken up,...

Artwork