For if one is standing in front of a closed door - It’s not difficult to browse the internet and find a guideline on how to open a key-closed door and, likewise, it is not hard to ignore the mandatory sentence we read at the beginning of these directions: ‘Only open locks which belong to you, or ones you have been given express permission to open’.

What you’ll read here is - obviously - not an introduction to the ‘art of lock picking’ as it’s only logic to understand that the guideline has by no means the intention to explain what will be revealed when the lock surrenders itself to its intruder: It just isn’t important to know what we’ll find on the other side of the wall.

But how to approach a work of art that, at first glance, does not seem to give an indication of the meaning of its existence? To permeate the im- permeable, we will have to make use of the only thing, the only object in our access: a hairpin.
Those who still have difficulties containing their curiosity will close one eye and peek with the other through the keyhole to get an idea of what lies behind, yet, they will merely get a vague and confined image of a spectrum. Another way not to seem ‘desperate-to-know’ is to resist the dive (deep deep dive) into a symbolical interpretation of this seemingly small and futile tool, as it will tell us nothing about the way to handle it best and, finally, to click the lock.

The/A solution here could be a delineation of the object’s ordinary nature as art gives us the capacity to traverse materialities. The formal existence of this pin, with its characteristic 180-degree bend after which the curves in mountain roads are called, is determined by its purpose, its function to fix, to attach, to model.

What if a form is repeated, the same, but different? Fluctuating its usabil- ity, scale, pliability - balancing between the functional and the ornamen- tal? How far can you go from the object’s original mold to the point in which the object’s conceptual meaning completely changes? What about the idea of space in relation to the attached and the unattached? And does it all end when the hairpin becomes a wall itself: a concrete, impervious, almost conceptual caricature?

We wonder – repeatedly pinning, deforming, and fiddling the lock, but then realize, only when it is silent you can hear the pin drop.

Dear Jan,
As I look at your practice through pictures on the world wide web, the thoughts that I can form on it remain unclear. Not because your work might be unnoticeable, but because it seems never to wait for someone to look at it. It moves, as if every work is still tangibly tied to the process, the dynamics that have created it. What do you think it is that makes it difficult to grasp, to pin down into interpretations and explanations?

And at the same time, it feels layered. It feels as if your work opens dialogues on its own. It emits different conversations that unfold in a polyphonic entirety, that float, as I can float on their unstable rhythm. I could ask it, you, many questions. But maybe your work itself asks more questions than it could ever answer?

Maybe it keeps the answers within it? In the process that produces it? The materials that carry it? The space it resides in?

Maybe its answers remain always unclear, leaving me with more questions. Maybe it resides in limbo, between photography, sculpture and installation?

Dear Jan,
We saw each other at your studio, and agreed that your work really needs but few words, that questions communicate enough. I agree with you. Its movement may be arrested when fixated in answers. So I am hesitant to write you again.

Yet the work I saw in your studio clings to me. I have quite an unclear picture of what was said that evening. Sentences moving like your practice – 'focus shifts all the time', you said –, impossible to finish one before another comes to mind. But your images and objects do persist in my mind.

What universe will your works create, what space within the exhibition space? Will they draw lines right through it, allying disparate objects, subtly but surely, as they have in my thoughts?

Is it contradictory that I think about your work as creating a universe, shaping a space, drawing lines of alliance, while the word 'fragmented' was omnipresent in our conversation?

‘Fragmented’, ‘broken’: poignant characterizations of that conversation. And of your work’s materiality. For however a space is shaped – or however shape exists in space – what can we see of its material dimension but fragments?

Is more information, then, simultaneously more fragmentation, more movement, multiplying lines of alliance? Will looking at the photographs you made, choreographing and signifying your objects, further blur any possible sentences about them?

Now caught up in the polyphonic movement of your practice – the movement that before I was merely observing – what I can clearly and unambiguously understand is its relation to our Zeitgeist. Or maybe it is a paradox, this unambiguous understanding. For is not our Zeitgeist essentially ambiguous? Polyphonic, fragmented, and shaped by a an ever growing multiplicity of transforming lines of alliance?