Much of Tatjana Danneberg’s work is made up of everyday motifs from the world of teenagers or young adults: jeans, colorfully made-up faces, playful approaches to physicality. These are images that the artist takes from her archive of analog photos and then enlarges, adapts with various techniques and materials, and transfers to canvas. In a series of painterly processes, new layers and levels emerge which, like veils, overlap or completely cover parts of the image. This enables distance, as well as triggering an underlying mood of melancholy: a thing that’s familiar in itself becomes something intangible.

For the wallpaper in the evn collection, Tatjana Danneberg, who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, chooses a familiar motif from the world of contemporary communications: email program windows that overlap each other and visualize the simultaneity of multiple workflows. In a continuous unpunctuated stream, an entered text repeats itself: Please don’t tell me to go home. The negated imperative appears as a mysterious mantra. The snippet from a photo showing a woman wrapped in a bath towel, her face turned away from the camera, seems to be connected to this instruction. It is joined by warning messages about using or sending photos via email. In this endless repetition of image and text(s), and ultimately also in the wallpaper’s tiled pattern, the question of netiquette – without doubt a pertinent one for anyone who communicates online – becomes a kind of virtual perpetuum mobile. The mélange of private and societal interests, and the difficulty in keeping them apart, bring the individual to a state of exhaustion in the data jungle, where they appear notably lonely. Identity, belonging, and the self-understanding of the individual in an environment perceived as hard to define: these are eternal themes of youth. Dealing with social change and finding one’s way in a society are, however, not only a privilege of the young but something that affects us all. 

HMR, 2023

Translation: Paul Richards