Contact

Till Heene - till<at>artport.online

On my own behalf

S’il ne fait pas beau à droite, je prends à gauche; si je me trouve peu apte à monter à cheval, je m’arrête…
Ai-je laissé quelque chose à voir derrière moi? J’y retourne; c’est toujours mon chemin. 
Je ne trace à l’avance aucune ligne déterminée, ni droite, ni courbe.

Michel de Montaigne, Essais III, 9

If the weather is bad on the right, I turn left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stop... Have I left something to see behind me? I go back; it is always my path. I do not trace any determined line in advance, neither straight nor curved.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays III, 9

"And you? What do you do?"

"I've been searching for answers for over half a century now. Over that time, I've become more accustomed to searching than finding. So I keep searching. Methods and means change. But making pictures and writing have been a constant over the years, something I can work with."

"Mmmm. What is the artist trying to tell us?"

"The works shown here are based on photographs. I respect photography first and foremost as a craft.

I mainly work with multiple exposures. With sometimes complex, sometimes less complex layers of several images or image elements, like stories within a larger story. My mainstay is in the 20th century, my playing field in the 21st: the possibilities of digital image processing suit my natural impatience. If I were still in practice, I would paint caves again.



First you dance, then you think. It's the natural order, Samuel Beckett is supposed to have said. 
I follow this natural order. I try to let images and thoughts dance. 
It is only through writing that I understand, after the big party, the steps and rhythm of a dance that leaves hardly any analogue traces behind."

"So? Can you make a living from it?"

"I work part-time as a German teacher at a language school in Basel. This work is a meaningful and social change of pace. I interact with people who move to this cosmopolitan city on the Upper Rhine. I consider teaching a privilege: sitting side by side with the language students and learning from them. What their homes are like and why they gave up or had to give up their homes.

My studio is located in Zell im Wiesental in the southern Black Forest, in a former textile and aerosol factory."

Juli 2025, Till Heene

"The following video is no longer up to date (September 2024). When I find the time, I'll make a new one."

Exhibitions