Sebastian Stumpf - Islands

Sebastian Stumpf`s (born 1980) first and central medium is the own body. His works are performances in the physical sense. But his interventions in the public space are not possible without the recording eye of the video camera or the camera. They are translated in precise recordings; action and picture are inseparable connected. The terrain, which Sebastian Stumpf uses, is the public space of the city with it`s given structure and the empty spaces of contemporary art institutions. His appearance in front of the camera seems as artistic as subversive: An insignificant architectonical detail becomes a release for a physical performance, which astonishes, surprises, distracts the viewer or makes him laugh. Therefore Stumpf rolls under a closing door of an underground car park, climbs on small trees in modern drawing-board architectures or uses a bridge not to cross a river, but to jump into it. As the protagonist of his photographies and videos Sebastian Stumpf is concerned with artificial spaces and urban utopias - places, in which the human body is only an abstract arithmetic figure in a constructed structure. He tracks down its gaps, exits and dead ends.