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![Gestures of Good]( "Gestures of Good")
infophoto: Roel Backaert
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![Gestures of Good]( "Gestures of Good")
infophoto: Roel Backaert
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![Gestures of Good]( "Gestures of Good")
infoLeft Side Left Blank, 1st of May on Dam Square (right) photo: Roel Backaert
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![Gestures of Good]( "Gestures of Good")
infoLife in the Post – (excerpt)
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![Put Another Wreath]( "Put Another Wreath")
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![Life in the Post –]( "Life in the Post –")
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![Once, back then. Already]( "Once, back then. Already")
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![The World We Enter]( "The World We Enter")
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![The World We Enter]( "The World We Enter")
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![The World We Enter]( "The World We Enter")
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![Tales, Truths and Territories]( "Tales, Truths and Territories")
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![Colonial Networks]( "Colonial Networks")
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![Flags of Convenience]( "Flags of Convenience")
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![Flags of Convenience]( "Flags of Convenience")
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![Flags of Convenience]( "Flags of Convenience")
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![Flags of Convenience]( "Flags of Convenience")
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I am a researcher and maker working through a re-examination of historical matters and image materials. In my work I question contemporary claims and existing assumptions in the fields of national identity, social legacies and their effects in political discourse. The practice mainly works through gestures of deconstruction, reconfiguration and appropriation of national symbols or familiar documentary imagery.
With a background in both graphic design and conceptual artistic thinking, the work is characterised by both informative accessibility as well as attention to detail in production of spatial installations, video and printed matter.
I seek to conduct research through studying existing collections, individual biographies and archives. Through a collaboration with these communities, associations and people experienced on either artistic practice or research, I want to communicate the stories contained within to new audiences.
Websites
Personal website
paulmielke.comSocial media
Curriculum vitae
Education
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2022 - 2022Tech Week Quartair, Den Haag (Netherlands)
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2021 - 2021Plastic Justice European League of Institutes of the Arts
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2020 - 2022MA Non Linear Narrative Den Haag, Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten diploma
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2012 - 2017BA Communication Design Fachhochschule Mainz diploma
exhibitions
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2022Graduation Show Royal Academy of Art The Hague, Netherlands From Friday, July 1 to Tuesday, July 5, the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) proudly presented a new cohort of graduated visual artists and designers. Group
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2022Please ( ) elaborate Online exhibition Spanning a range of media, exhibition formats and disciplines, the show pieces cover a multitude of subjects in order to unravel and demonstrate their complexities. As such, Please Elaborate is not only the title of the exhibition, but also the question the recent graduates often asked themselves in the process of making their works. In doing so, they responded with thoughtful and engaging comments to contemporary issues of gender equality, post-truth politics, sound pollution, global warming and neurodiversity. nln.allinthistogether.online/ Group
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2021Plastic Justice Exhibition at the Plastic Health Summit Theater Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands During the Plastic Health Summit on 21 October 2021, a selection of works were presented which examined the impact of invisible micro-plastics on the environment. Visitors of the conference at Theater Amsterdam included an international audience from NGOs, local government organisations and scientists. The event was a great opportunity to have elaborate discussions with professionals from the field and receive some first-hand knowledge from experts at the forefront of the fight against plastic pollution. plasticjustice.eu/ Group
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2021Plastic Justice at the Leiden Law School Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands At the invitation of Leiden University, the Master Non Linear Narrative presented a selection of Plastic Justice research projects from 3 to 13 December 2021. The exhibition was open to non-academic public, on display at the Kamerlingh Onnes Building. The production and exhibition design were executed by Louise Rietvink and Judy Wetters. plasticjustice.eu/ Group
Projects
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2022
Gestures of Good Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands graduation.kabk.nl/2022/paul-mielke Gestures of Good focuses on the wreath as an object at the centre of nationalised acts of commemoration: Performances which are constitutive for Germany's identity, as signifiers of a recurring thematisation of and ‘coming to terms’ with the past. The project questions whether this ‘culture of remembering’ is subconsciously reinterpreted as an achievement rather than a duty by German society. A video work composed of a series of historical photographs shows the repetitive nature of these wreath-laying ceremonies to suggest a possible growing indifference towards the individual occasions. The corresponding publication compiles personal memories of affective news imagery and presents details from archival books and magazines to juxtapose hues of German heritage. Herein, National Socialism is considered as an omnipresent setting rather than a closed chapter, still graspable in everyday life, economy, or family history. This collection interrogates the notion of West Germany as ‘liberated’, as well as the unification of West and East as an alleged redemption moment: A ‘finally right’, another ‘becoming good’.
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2022
Put Another Wreath Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands video loop, part of the series of graduation works entitled ‘Gestures of Good’ Performative remembrance and commemoration occasions are at the centre of Germany’s national identity, formally documented by state institutions. Contemporary political discourse however, while ostensibly still revolving around and thereby often instrumentalising ‘learnings from the past’, appears fundamentally disjointed from contemporary issues and rarely leaves the national domain. Historical photographs of wreath laying ceremonies between 1945 and today were manually sourced, mainly from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) and the president’s website. Centred around a turning wreath, the animation introduces the prop and intends to make conscious how these occasions function in the nation’s external portrayal.
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2022
1st of May on Dam Square Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands video, 5:45 min, part of the series of graduation works entitled ‘Gestures of Good’ Within the year-long cycle of wreath laying ceremonies, specific dates and central memorial sites recur. Other occasions don’t fit into or are not deemed worthy of the rehearsed and unquestioned militarist spectacle. There is an anti-fascism that is ‘worth remembering’ – in a country where ‘crimes of the past’ can be researched on any corner and which appears naturally short on stories of resistance – ultimately raising the question for whom we are commemorating. The memorial site becomes an inaccessible stage on which the wreath, momentarily a product of living material, finds its first and last application. The video was recorded on the afternoon of 1st of May at Dam Square in Amsterdam, which functions as one of the main sites of Dodenherdenking (Remembrance of the Dead, 4th of May) and Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day, 5th of May). The timing of the performance is based on a wreath laying of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on 22nd of June, 2021 to commemorate the victims of the German invasion of the Soviet Union 80 years ago.
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2022
Left Side Left Blank Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands Moiré wreath ribbon, fringes, part of the series of graduation works entitled ‘Gestures of Good’ Commemoration wreaths include a ribbon in flag colours, even in case the choice of flower colour is not meant to reference anything specific. In presidential use the left side of the ribbon, usually the side of the sender’s message, is left blank, presumably to guarantee high versatility. It’s “in stock” status speaks of the all-time availability of state grieving (for some) and might at the same time signal a certain indifference to the specific occasion.
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2022
Life in the Post – Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands publication, RISO comcolor & four-colour print, archival books and magazines, posters, wall hanging, flowers, part of the series of graduation works entitled ‘Gestures of Good’ The publication and its corresponding collection of materials function as an ongoing tactic to understand how ‘remembrance culture’ functions – in correlation with a German public’s addressing of its history. It intends to make conscious a web of relations, the local conditions and narratives that make possible this conception of and belief in ‘good remembrance’. It is based on three groups of assumptions: – The notion of business as a neutral actor with a strong contemporary lobby, contradicted by a visualisation of continuities between modern wealth and use of forced labour or expropriation during the Nazi era (as in the case of BMW) – The shifting self-perception of German society, from a public sphere of the “repressing defeated” to one of the “commemorating liberated”, which is built on an exchange of apology and forgiveness and thus homogenises, neglects and reconsolidates it’s “victim position” - The portrayal of German unity as a national peace achievement and overcoming of post-war trauma; in reality accompanied by xenophobic outbreaks of violence and nationalist excesses as well as an erasure of the GDR legacy and thus of socialist relations of commemoration
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2021
The World We Enter Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands 2-channel video, angled screen setup, 9:55 min The video project 'The World We Enter' investigates and traces the spread of microplastics through air. It connects their behaviour to aeroplankton organisms, such as the nematode. Some of these microscopic organisms are capable of travelling both in a live stage and a state of suspended animation which allows them to withstand hostile conditions and makes them frequently the colonists of barren environments. The video ends on a speculative note, positing the further discovery of a fusion of organic and non-organic material and shows how the proliferation of “aeroplastics” is becoming an increasingly worrying and urgent invisible problem.
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2021
Once, back then. Already. Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands "There was this spirit, a vision of a richer, interconnected world in which we would move faster, better, with ease alone. A belief in an evolution, a history progressing in a straight line, no, exponentially. It was beyond our contemporaneous imagination, a curve so steep that we didn’t need to explain how it could ever be achieved." The publication is based on a process of tracing and overwriting blurred images from personal memory, mainly from the late 1990s and early 2000s. It invites the viewer to rediscover continuities and question modes of media rendition that lead to an embedding in collective emotion and memory, as opposed to an affective quality of the seemingly mundane (with their respective local, Western or international validity). The collection of images from news and popular culture, of political figures, consumer goods, toys and other objects simultaneously comments on a contemporary culture of referencing and ‘Nostalgia-Bait’.
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2021
Retail for Reference Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands An ongoing investigation into the manual copying, duplication, recombination, deconstruction and counterfeiting of 'hype' fashion items
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2021
Royal Code Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands The collection, based on panels inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, presents a giant online map of imagery connected to European Royal Families which can be navigated by zooming and toggling filters. These additions (layers) to the images represent investigations into these perfect-to-detail photos and paintings like focusing on a colour palette, shoes or the setup of the portrait, highlighting the referencing and relations of these staged depictions.
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2021
Tales, Truths and Territories Free Press Unlimited The Hague In collaboration with Erica Gargaglione & Elvi Kleyn, Free Press Unlimited and the pan-Caucasian news platform JAMnews, for Facts Not Filters The cooperation began precisely when war broke out again in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus region on 27 November, 2020. It continued until 19 November and, already during the fighting, it was referred to as a “social media and drone war”, being only the latest stage in a conflict deadlocked for decades, with century-old trauma still unleashing its force of agitation. Through our interviews with editor Margarita Akhvlediani and an observation of JAMnews, a local Armenian-, Azerbaijani-, Georgian-, Russian- and English-language online news platform, we gained detailed insights into the work on the ground. Particularly striking and central to the story was a completely divergent reporting and the resulting “multiple truths” on the belligerent sides, in Azerbaijan and Armenia/Artsakh. The work – unexhibited due to the pandemic – consists of two stacks of ceramics depicting the territorial changes of Nagorno-Karabakh, within a conflict strongly linked to claims of homelands, to territorial gains. They represent the two realities, overlaid with a series of maps of the frontline. These graphics were created using information by JAMnews and an analysis of Twitter channels, the content of which is also visualised in a timeline on the associated website.
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2017
Colonial Networks Hochschule Mainz: University of Applied Sciences Mainz, Germany Starting out with a look into the ‘Panama Papers’, the infographic weaving visualises links between the information networks of the colonial era and today’s overseas data connections. Structures of data and capital flow are based on an imperial legacy, at the same time, they allow for monitoring and control of information by insititutions of the empires’ successor states. At the end of this examination pointing into many directions of further research, one might ask how “artificial territories”, such as special economic zones, constructed in international waters or as coastal embankments, enable neo-capitalist structures and further complicate legal control.
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2016
Flags of Convenience ArtEZ University of the Arts Arnhem The installation deals with the practice of “flagging” in international cargo shipping: a ship can be registered in a country other than the one in which its owners or operators reside. In legal terms, the vessel becomes a kind of national space or moving territory, where different laws apply, making it possible to undermine social and environmental standards. The effects of this tactic are represented typographically and grouped in three main themes at the bottom of the basin. They refer to the states of Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, some of the main providers of ship registries (more than 39% in terms of worldwide carrying capacity), which has different individual implications for these states and reflects local histories of conflict. Their flag colours are visualised on the water surface but blend into an oily carpet over time.
Publications
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2022Facts Not Filters Catalog Royal Academy of Art The Hague Main eds.: Lauren Alexander, Niels Schrader The Hague, Netherlands www.kabk.nl/projecten/nln-facts-not-filters ‘Facts not Filters’ was a research collaboration project between the Master Non Linear Narrative Master Non Linear Narrative programme at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and Free Press Unlimited held in the academic year 2020-2021. Inspired by case studies highlighting the need for press freedom all around the world, seven (groups of) students examined the complexities of culturally rooted and geographically specific nuances related to regional news reporting and distribution. Their artistic results were diverse works using physical structures, video or audio highlighting media functions and threats press freedom is exposed to.