“But all these photos I took that triggered things in me, all the things I saw that made my thinking like this now, today. That is what I would like to publish as a work, because that has contributed a bit to the fact that I am now leaving here with these thoughts.
What happens if I delete these pieces of memory from my mobile phone – every picture I took in Lichtenberg, with the hope that this can become or kick off the great work of art? I no longer have a digital memory and these images then only exist in analogue printed form.
That’s a level that plays an important role for me whenever I take photos with my mobile phone. When my buddy Kevin is around, he always says data rubbish. And I think he’s completely right. It all takes up a lot of storage space and storage space means energy and I waste a lot of energy with it. I’ve already cut back my consumption a lot, maybe I’ll manage to take myself back a bit digitally by first deleting the Lichtenberg experiences digitally and transferring them to the analogue.” (Simon Freund, March 2022)
Simon Freund, born in Königstein im Taunus in 1990, is a German conceptual artist. Over the years he has created a portfolio that includes everything from installations, sculptures, photography, video, objects to internet art. The expression and medium of his work changes with the message, but his intention remains the same: to question, challenge, criticise, stimulate and provoke.
Freund’s work deals intensively and comprehensively with the cultural narratives of today’s consumer society. Influenced by his experience as a fashion designer, he criticises the status quo of our consumer culture in a subtle but thought-provoking way. Aesthetically, his work fits into the cultural codes that define a consumerist society, while raising some of the most important questions of today.
His medium of choice from the beginning has been the internet, which allows him to share his work directly with the world. Freund’s work is free and accessible to anyone with internet access. By exposing himself publicly (countless.info), by putting his life on display (fiverooms.cam), by giving the world full access to his own (allipossess.com), Freund questions our desire for self-expression, our longing for belonging, the question of real and fake, forms of radical transparency in the digital age and their influence on the perception of others.
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