Been Surfing My Whole Life
"Been Surfing My Whole Life" is conceived as an allegory about how fear arises, what it attaches itself to, and what it conceals. The central work, "Sometimes You Make Me Feel Blue", is a hybrid of sound installation and sculpture. A self-built wooden sound system — with speakers for voice above and subwoofers below — references sound systems used in subcultural and street contexts while also situating itself between design and art. Here, sound is not merely information but sculptural material, permeating the object, the architecture, and the bodies of viewers.
Part of the audio was recorded on the Los Angeles Metro during my Fulbright stay at California State University Long Beach. These urban in-between spaces reveal social tensions, inequalities, and power relations. The accidental recording makes such structures audible and is used deliberately as a compositional tool. Another layer references a song faintly audible in the background, including the line *“Sometimes You Make Me Blue.”*
The sculpture is coated in paraffin, beeswax, and resin. Poured in net-like flows, the wax forms an organic surface reminiscent of scarred skin — sealing yet fragile, preserving yet flammable. Its historical use in anatomical models connects the material to the visualization of wounds and healing. As a petroleum product, paraffin also points to global extractivism. Within this framework, the white shark becomes a metaphor for exploitative power structures.
Surrounding paintings incorporate the same wax, linking installation and painting into a spatial landscape. Installed in the vaulted Kolosssaal — originally intended to house a monumental colonial sculpture — the work occupies the site of a former monument and critically confronts that colonizer history.
The sound transcript reveals how fear often targets constructed or media-amplified images rather than real dangers. The cliché of the great white shark obscures the greater threat of the waves — a central metaphor in the exhibition. Waves stand for life’s actual forces:
transformation, surrender, and resilience. For me, these include experiences of prejudice tied to a Turkish-Kurdish and German background, as well as living with an autoimmune illness whose invisible flare-ups echo the hidden presence of the shark. Drawing on Freud and Fanon, fear appears not only personal but socially produced — projected onto an “other” while structural realities remain unseen.
The exhibition proposes that we must learn to move with the waves rather than fixate on imagined threats. It is an attempt to create art under conditions of vulnerability and resistance — not in spite of fear, but with awareness of how it is constructed.