The Importance of 15 Minutes
The origin of this work dates back to late 2015. While sitting in a public park, I observed a mundane yet symptomatic ritual of our accelerated culture: the pasting of advertising posters. Within only 15 minutes, still wet with paste, it was covered by another poster. Surprisingly, it took only about twenty more minutes until the process repeated a third time. This fleeting cycle immediately brought to mind Andy Warhol’s iconic prophecy about “15 minutes of fame.” It sparked a dual inquiry: how to “harvest” these accumulated layers of time, and if there is even a significant difference between these rapidly vanishing moments of supposed importance.
A few weeks later, I returned to that same park equipped with a utility knife. I cut out several thick, board-like layers directly from the billboard, harvesting multiple strata of time in a single incision. My initial intention was to use these solid, ready-made “poster boards” in their entirety, preserving the sheer density of the material as it was found.
The Architecture of the Gaze
In line with my general practice, the development of this work was intentionally long-term. I felt that a completion ten years later would be appropriate to respect the temporal weight of the material. In December 2025 and January 2026, curiosity finally took over. Instead of using the poster boards as a solid ready-made, I wanted to look into the “archive” beneath the surface. In a labor-intensive process, I soaked the boards in my bathroom to separate, clean, and dry each individual stratum.
The result is a collage where some layer are granted its own “stage.” The work is not a flat surface but a vertical archaeology of presence and disappearance. Visually, the composition is dominated by the “eye” as a recurring motif. These eyes create an unsettling interaction: in one instance, an eye looks out through a trial lens to confront the observer; in another, a gaze looks up horrified at the layer above, acknowledging its own displacement. Through these physical ruptures, the collage generates a spectrum of atmospheres—ranging from galloping dynamics and sudden pauses to twilight, blindness, and a sense of apathy.
Attention Capitalism and the “Blackstar” Context
Only within this deeper context does the specific material origin become relevant. One of the layers stems from the period following the death of David Bowie, when a poster for his final album, Blackstar, was being mounted. Although text fragments like “just for one day” appear—using the distinct typography of Jonathan Barnbrook—the work is not a tribute to a person. Rather, it uses these fragments as a rhetorical echo of the question Bowie once asked Warhol: “Where are my 15 minutes?”
The piece addresses the “attention capitalism” of our society and the desperate striving to be at the center of focus, if only for a brief moment. It is a critique of the “happiest day of your life” mentality—the obsession with a singular, peak event rather than the effort to make every day potentially significant with less expenditure. These fragments of “liebe, leide, tanze, lebe” (love, suffer, dance, live) or the note “letzter Auftritt in Europa” serve as remnants of a race for fame that has already been overwritten by the next 15 minutes.
Medium: Multimedia Collage (reclaimed billboard strata) on composite sandwich panel with an honeycomb core.
Dimensions: 140 cm x 99 cm x 2.5 cm.
Installation: Integrated, invisible wire tension system; allows for single-nail mounting with options for either a flush-to-wall or floating mount.