Timur Si-Qin

Berlin-based multimedia artist Timur Si-Qin explores the universality of aesthetic motifs in advertisements and popular culture. His fascination with the causal chain of events that goes into contemporary image culture sees Si-Qin utilise commercial products (often linked to preoccupations with health, vitality or luxury) like Axe body wash, Yoga mats, stock photography and promotional display structures. He presents these objects like biological relics in an effort to interrogate the broad question of why visual conventions reoccur so persistently. He finds answers in a range of factors - from human physiology to evolution- rejecting the separation between culture and biology and celebrating their convergent lineage. For his series “Axe Effect”, Si-Qin impaled Axe-branded men’s shower-gel bottles on medieval swords, causing them to bleed neon fluids in an apparent metaphor of the “violent and erotic inter-penetration of the arms race and the mating call in the guise of product placement” – his work asserts that if one can understand the tendencies of a material, one can use that knowledge to activate the item’s capacities, in the hope that a greater understanding of the materiality of culture may lead us toward unlocking its unrealized capacities.

Timur Si-Qin, born 1984, is a Berlin-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent and a graduate of the University of Arizona (MFAO. Selected solo exhibitions include Basin of Attraction at Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn (2013), Infinite Surrender, Focused Control at Société in Berlin (2013) and Legend at Fluxia in Milan (2011). Selected group shows include The Great Acceleration at the Taipei Biennial (2014), Metarave I “It’s only a fantasty” at Wallriss Artspace in Freiburg (2014), Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit at Kunsthalle Wien (2014), Art Post-Internet at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014), Speculations on Anonymous Materials at Fridericianum in Kassel (2013), A Material World at PSM in Berlin (2012) and Performance Anxiety at Stadium in New York (2011).