Interview by Claudia Steinberg 
Portrait by Doro Zinn

CS A critic has called time your “favourite material”, and you often use constellations of stones as embodiments of eternity. Tell me about your relationship to these ancient objects. 

AK It’s a beautiful, poetic suggestion that time is material. I like the idea, but that’s not how it is for me. Time is one of my many interests. It interacts with lots of things – and influences everything. Time affects all people on an existential level, but it can become implicated in our own egocentrism. That’s why we talk about it so much, write about it, sing about it, try to find images. We mourn our own mortality, even while we’re still alive. I am trying to keep a distance from it, because I find human self-importance inappropriate. The state of “feeling sorry for ourselves” in relation to our mortality often leads to kitschiness. Time is the most important thing for us, because we are time-limited creatures. In that sense, comparing the past to something solid like a stone makes sense. A stone may be millions or billions of years old, and we simply cannot comprehend that timescale. Beyond ten thousand years, everything becomes abstract. Stones are witnesses to the Earth’s formation. Even the marble that we find beautiful carries traces of past catastrophes: exploding volcanoes, dried seas, dead bodies and shifting continents. They are records of the planet’s life. 

CS You have said that spacetime can only be expressed in metaphors. Does that suggest that time is something that only art can translate? 

AK Well, spacetime is barely understandable at all, through art or any other metaphor. It is an abstract story that we can only approach in increments. It is not really perceivable on a sensory level. Scientifically, we require models – imitations of time. Art is not so different: it is also a simulacrum. Art signifies something else. It is an entry, an opening. So, one could compare science and art quite convincingly – especially abstract art. 

CS Your work is rooted in ecosophy, deep ecology and environmental ethics, yet it doesn’t necessarily reveal this intellectual and ethical background. How does this research influence your art? 

AK I try to figure out what nature is, how we deal with it and what it does to us. I often use natural materials. We pay attention to the origin of our materials. We know every single step and most of the people involved in the production. That gives us a feeling of safety regarding environmental questions. But above all, I respect every atom of this planet, and I try to understand this world. However, I do not try to teach anything. It is much more about asking myself questions with the hope that it might motivate others to do the same. The intellectual backdrop does not need to be visible. The artwork must first of all speak for itself, without explaining itself or apologising. 

CS You are interested in string theory, a theoretical model used in physics that suggests the universe consists of billions of tiny vibrating strings made up of fundamental particles. How do you conceptualise a visual metaphor of something so ungraspable? 

AK I do not need a metaphor. I can feel these dimensions every second. Every possibility, every step, every direction is another dimension. I use objects as mirrored copies of themselves. I use mirrors to create gaps in this dimension. I make funnels that cut through rooms and bend into other ones. I work with repetitions, addition and subtraction. I have done performances with identical twins, and other people’s handwriting. I try to copy moments and memories. That is my way. 

CS You have collected birdsong, traffic noise and sounds caught by the space probes Voyagers 1 and 2. Is listening part of your art practice? Is data collection? Perhaps there is even a satisfaction or pleasure in quantification. 

AK That is an interesting question. Indeed, there are many unconscious sounds and a kind of noise in my work. I try to listen to the whisper of things somehow: I am interested in the sounds we perceive unconsciously. In the Voyager work, it was more about how we wanted to represent ourselves, than about the selection of data. Collecting is an almost addictive activity. [I am drawn to] taking things apart to classify them. For a while, I collected the same exact objects. Somehow, it was about bringing back together things that had been scattered. It’s tempting to collect old things, things older than us, and consider the traces of their time and their owners. In collecting these items, we also collect a piece of time, to have more of it and to bring together things that are older than us. 

CS You have had your genetic code analysed, yielding some 259,025 pages of information, sections of which you sold as NFTs. What does it mean for someone to own this very personal and very abstract information? 

AK It is the most intimate information one can reveal. I gave everything of myself, and yet, even with that information, one would not know me. The question becomes, then, what actually is this information? When NFTs were popular, people asked me whether I wanted to make one as well. Everyone sensed a big financial gain. I saw no sense in it because I saw a lack of new artistic quality in the use of the medium. DNA is actually an NFT: a non-fungible token, a unique identity code. That was the NFT I wanted to sell: myself! I put my entire DNA information onto the blockchain as NFTs. I was curious whether people would try to buy all of me or only certain parts, like my bones, eye colour or height. Of course, that is not really possible. I liked the idea of spreading myself across the world, of scattering parts of my DNA. I was also curious if there might be a secondary market for it. The experiment didn’t work very well; we didn’t sell many.  It was also all a bit complicated, and the idea of becoming rich through self-sale did not work either. It was self-consciously provocative. 

CS Do you consider this work an objectification of yourself or an abstraction? Has it affected your perception of self? 

AK I learnt a lot from this work. Humans share around 99.99% of the same DNA. It is shocking that, even with this knowledge, people still elevate themselves above others. I find it somehow very bonding to know that a tree has more complex DNA than I do, that I am related to a mouse. I think we emphasise similarity far too little in the constant search for individuality. .