EN
DESeries
"A maximum of seven images per series are shown here. I work with this restriction in order to live up to my own standards of constantly questioning my work. On the other hand, I would like to do my part to stem the flood of images a little. These digital images, which you may be viewing and swiping through on the miniature screen of your smartphone, do not do justice to the originals printed on fine art paper."
Till Heene, Juli 2025
Nevertheless, we invite you to stay a while and, if you are interested, we would be happy to show you more of our latest work via video call. Contact us at till<at>artport.online
People in transit
"People in Transit is based on photographs I take at airports, mostly at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Its architect, Paul Andreu, created wonderful architectural sculptures. The traces of the 1970s, or rather the consequences of a French-style function follows form approach, are now an additional stress factor for travellers. But if you go to this airport without the intention of travelling anywhere, you can have a wonderful time there.
At airports, we rush through a more or less large time window between arrival and departure. Just like in real life.
I look at the people there. I watch them. I photograph their haste, their brief pauses, sometimes their fleeting encounters. The concrete necessity of making real people unrecognisable gives me the great freedom to design the images in a completely different way. The images show quite obviously from the outset that they are lying. I find that very honest."
Till Heene, June 2025
The old mobile phone
"The old mobile phone is based on pictures I took over twenty years ago with one of the first camera phones. I rediscovered the phone in a drawer a few months ago, charged it, and lo and behold! Suddenly, all the people I knew back then, some of whom were friends of mine, reappeared. I laboriously recovered their images from the coarse, pixelated display and edited them. They are printed on beautiful Japanese handmade paper so that they are now more comfortable than before in the dark drawer.
I believe that it can be a question of artistic design to break away from the race for ever higher resolution and to deal with the stages of transition in more detail. In my understanding, this is not nostalgia, but a refusal to adapt artistic work to the ever-shorter product life cycles and the obsolescence of the digital tools I use.
I draw a parallel to the work of the Pictorialists at the beginning of the 20th century, who already staged photographs like paintings. Or why not also to the work of the Pointillists, who - today we would say: pixelated their paintings a little earlier than the Pictorialists with the means of painting."
Till Heene, June 2025
Robert Walser, or: The melting point
"Has any poet ever succeeded as well as the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) in quoting a character from his own work even in death?
‘'I don't have time,’ Simon said quietly to himself, "I must hurry to reach the next town, otherwise I would not feel any anxiety about lingering a little longer with this poor dead fellow, who was a poet and a dreamer. How nobly he has chosen his grave. He lies in the midst of magnificent green fir trees covered with snow. I will not report this to anyone. Nature looks down on her dead, the stars sing softly above his head, and the night birds chirp; this is the best music for one who has no hearing and no feeling left.'
This was written, rather romantically and morbidly, by the twenty-eight-year-old Robert Walser in his novel Geschwister Tanner. Fifty years later, on Christmas Day, he himself lay dead in the snow near Herisau in the canton of Appenzell, struck down by a heart attack. Two farm boys found the body; an unnamed police photographer took the last picture.
Arnold Odermatt could not have staged the traces of the accident any better.
An appropriation of this image resulted in a work that was shown in a collective exhibition in October 2024 at the Leupin Gallery in Basel. It is a tetraptych that takes up the poet's last image, liberates it from its sober, documentary black and white, and playfully continues it."
Till Heene, October 2024