Maria Magdalena Bisch

Lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany

Artist statement

I used to find it reassuring to see the past as a story that never returns and can be closed, like a book that has been written to the end. Now I am interested in what runs counter to this idea. I am always looking for structures and systems that appear again and again, which influence the present and sometimes - as if unnoticed - chain it to the past. I am interested in what shaped the circumstances into which one was born long before one's own existence and which robs one of the supposed freedom to start anew. I am interested in being woven into networks that were started at some point and that keep cropping up in many things because one cannot destroy them - and without them one would perhaps lose one's footing. I am interested in the people in these networks, who are ultimately often unconsciously the weavers of the networks and yet often try to do everything differently and write a new story on a blank sheet of paper. I am interested in them, the authors of the present. For this present, which ultimately is often not an untouched story on a blank sheet of paper, but rather the story of people who have repeatedly and tirelessly attempted to write a new, different story on an old sheet of paper on which all stories have always been written. And for the authors whose writing is often guided and forced into different paths by what has already been written - and who nevertheless try to find their own writing in all of this.

Artwork