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

First you dance, then you think. It's the natural order.

Samuel Beckett

"To put it analogously, I was an amateur photographer who was lucky enough to run out of film. The process of reflection began as a dry run. At first, I thought that answers could be found for which there were no images yet. Now, I search for images as questions. The half-life of answers is too short.

Taking pictures, reflecting on photography, and writing have been constants over the years. The basis of the work shown here is photographs. First and foremost, photography deserves respect as a craft. That's something I learned again later in life. I primarily work with multiple exposures, layering several images or image elements like stories within a larger narrative. I search for correspondences. The individual images are like individual notes that resonate and combine to form the chord of the overall image. Taken apart, they could reveal a melody whose linearity corresponds to a visual story.

My foundation is in the 20th century, my creative spark in the 21st. The possibilities of digital image editing suit my natural impatience. If I were still in practice, I'd be painting caves again.

I work part-time as a German language teacher in Basel. I teach all levels from A1 to C2. What pleases me most is when students laugh at sentences like: 
Anna log, dass sich der Balken bog oder Geh nie tief ins Wasser, wenn du nicht schwimmen kannst oder Geh nie talwärts, wenn du noch Kraft in den Beinen hast.

The journey into the land of ambiguity is a long haul; once you arrive, you forfeit your return flight. This nonetheless serious work, within which the language and its dialectal variations are also presented as a vast playground, is a meaningful and social change of pace. I consider teaching a privilege: a sustainable journey without jet lag and a vital shift in perspective that, in these turbulent, binary times, reveals to me the beauty of the world in all its diversity.

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

Till Heene, December 2025

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

Exhibitions