Hi there!
I am an artist (half Finnish, half German) working mainly with photography. The central theme in my artistic work is the human body.
Due to my personal eating-disorder experience I felt the need to work on that issue at some point in an candid and subtle way. Since for my understanding there are overlapping aspects between the different eating disorder types, I did not limit my working field to a particular one. Nor does my approach refer to statistics.
When I asked myself how to start with the work, I knew that I didn’t want to deal with or ‘explain’ the issue through showing bodies as exposed. I wanted to try to create images that represent a state of mind. Images of something that is very complicated and complex and disturbing in a way. I wanted encounters to be the core of the work and narratives the material I work with. So I started to work simply through listening to my participants. Due to my personal experience, I had direct access to their narratives, which were very complex. This created a specific connection, instantly immediate and intimate. Finally the work, consisting of images and citations, is based upon narratives of people with whom I collaborated intensively for a lengthy period of time. The working process was very beautiful, even if sometimes hard too.
Just recently the work got published by Kehrer Verlag in a book-format titled UNGLEICHGEWICHT (imbalance).
In addition to the artistic work the book contains two texts: An article by philosophy researcher Isabella Marcinski titled ‘The Question of Lived Experience: A Gap in Research on Eating Disorders’, and an interview, where I tell about approaches and intentions.
Here you can get an idea about the work:
‘When it starts, it’s like
being in a cloud of
static noise, as if the space
would become white.’
If you want to know more about the book or if you have any questions, I am very happy to answer! Either through this channel or send a private message to me at mail@karinasirkku.com.
My warmest regards,
Karina-Sirkku Kurz
