all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe, 2008 

adhesive vinyl pattern on glass, smoke machine

KoCA, Weimar

KoCA, an artist-run project housed in a former DDR newspaper kiosk, had long been used as a display case—a compact vitrine for small exhibitions. For my installation I wanted to undo that logic and let the kiosk itself become the artwork. Its anodised gold aluminium shell already possessed a strange glamour, a muted shimmer that hovered between municipal utility and accidental ornament. I responded by covering the glass with mirrored gold vinyl, creating a reflective skin that echoed the kiosk’s own material palette and folded the surroundings—and the viewer—back into the work.

The vinyl pattern drew on DDR-era surface vocabularies: modular repeats, tiled rhythms, the blunt lyricism of breezeblock geometries and sign-writing motifs. Up close the pattern behaves like a decorative puzzle; from afar it operates more like a signal ricocheting between legibility and nonsense. This unstable readability aligns with the title, lifted from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, where invented words feel nearly meaningful, hovering in the space between recognition and bewilderment.

At night a small puff of smoke escapes through the serving hatch, giving the kiosk a faint, theatrical breath. It is not symbolic; it is simply a gentle animation, a way of letting the kiosk appear to wake up in its own scene. The work treats this compact piece of socialist-era architecture as a collaborator rather than a container, allowing it to flicker briefly with a different kind of agency—neither sculpture nor building exactly, but a playful, reflective presence in the city.