Urs Fischer: Play

You told me you are in London now. But where are you really? Not just physically, but also emotionally and artistically?

I lived in Russia, Georgia and Turkey before. In those countries, I felt like their culture kind of pushed people to conform. If you were different, thought differently, looked differently, you felt stressed or not allowed to be yourself. Maybe I'm lucky, but here (London) I feel that I can be whoever I want to be. All those things about representing myself, I start to do this not only indirectly through my art, but also through my body and clothing as well as capturing it. I want to be, not only behind the camera, but also in the frame now. 

Do you feel like you blend in more where you are now, compared to Russia or Georgia? Like you can integrate better into society? 

Yeah. Also people here have interest in what's happening in Russia, my culture, what's making me authentic. In Georgia, I felt like I had to hide my origins. In Russia, I had to hide my creative and queer identity. That's crazy. Though I found in my home country many things that made me who I am. I think it was the same things that traumatized me that inspired me. At the time, I could expect people, police included, to attack me or humiliate me. I felt extremely unsafe and unprotected. Now I can just go out and have fun. I feel free. 

You've been photographing for a long time now, was it a way to metabolize the world around you? How do you think your post-soviet roots have shaped that visual language? 

My art mostly flows from the unconscious. Sometimes I plan and conceptualize, but often the full meaning only comes after I've taken the photo. I started photography in school, through photos of classmates, aesthetics, this 'i-don't-give-a-fuck" vibe. Later, I studied at The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (formerly Smolny College), it was the only place in my city with a European style education. I earned a BA in film critique. That's when I began analyzing my own work. For me, a direct flash, which I used a lot, was a metaphor for a sharp and disturbing, affective encounter with the outside world, which scares and amazes you at the same time. If we talk about Kant's dichotomy, it's more about the sublime than the beautiful. Then I would define colors and subjects of my work as a maniacal staged smile, as something overweight, oversaturated, and double-bottomed. I want my art to get more and more theatrical, dark, Rembrandt. From low culture not to high culture, but to sublime, frightening and beckoning at the same time. In real life, I felt unsafe, marginalized. I dressed in dark clothes, trying to hide myself. 

In one of your photographs, two men appear in a highly charged position, in a war-like setting. One crouching with a Kalashnikov, the other bent beneath him in a striking sculptural pose, all this while being naked. What can you say about it? It felt so powerful and political.

I titled this photo Bad habits. It was a response to the propaganda of traditional values and stereotypes established in Russia. The unnatural poses highlight how the state uses men for military purposes, turning them into puppets of the regime. The Russian state promotes this patriarchal, homophobic narrative where men, considered as a defender and a warrior, must suppress others through physical and sexual violence. That's why I tried to show -sculpture like- figures stripped off subjectivity. Art can evoke emotions that the regime coldly tries to block.

Did you ever feel like your very presence became a confrontation or a statement? That your body, existence itself, was political?

Yes. Almost everything in our lives is being attempted to be controlled. Political regimes affect people. My first confrontation was with people influenced by the regime. I resented that I couldn't be "normal". I wasn't allowed to be myself or to access high culture, because I’m considered different. So I turned to lower culture, marginal stuff, as a form of resistance. I wasn't welcomed in teams or publications doing mainstream. It took me five or six years before people started reaching out to collaborate.

You mentioned turning to marginal culture as resistance. I can notice that in the way you’re combining humor with threat, beauty with a sense of protest, as well as through postures or symbolic objects that subvert meaning. I'm curious about how you navigate that kind of symbolic weight?

Partly intuitively. It connects to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of carnival culture- where, for a brief moment, social norms are inverted. It also relates to Soviet montage theory, particularly the work of director and film theorist Sergey Eisenstein, who developed the concept of the “montage of attractions”, and especially the theory of intellectual montage. He believed that when two or more shots are edited together, a new meaning emerges, one that is not present in the individual shots alone. This approach was crucial for conveying ideological, emotional or political messages through cinema. In my photographs, when someone holds an object, it's not just about the object itself, it's about the hybridity it evokes. How the juxtaposition creates layers of meanings beyond the visible. These characters in my work are cyborgs, in a sense.

It echoes so much with Haraway's Cyborg concept. This refusal of purity. The hybrid body that resists categorization. I noticed the omnipresence of technology in your work, such as earbuds intertwined as people kissing, as well screens, wires.. Does the figure of the cyborg resonate with you? 

Absolutely, my work fights with language and the idea of "naturalness". Nothing is truly natural. Also the cyborg idea aligns with Gilles Deleuze's concept of schizoanalysis. He and Guattari came up with "rhizomes", meaning networks without a center or hierarchy. It's a nonlinear web of connection between everything in the world. That's what, in the frame, are my “body experiments”, maybe a kind of new Dada. Because random connections and the belief in them can become a new truth for you. I collect elements from the world that resonate with me and become part of my world. So yes, I consider myself a cyborg artist. People often emphasize genetics or biology, but I believe we are more shaped by our social environments and patterns. Blending the body with other elements is, for me, contemporary nature.

Thinking about what you said, this idea of a body as a site of assemblage, of collecting resonances in a nonlinear way, I’m drawn to how that manifests in the emotional texture of your work. There’s this haunting, tender eroticism that I feel is striking in your photography. In a world which tries to erase or criminalize queerness, showing this intimacy can be seen as an act of resistance. How do you allow queerness in your photography remain porous? How do you frame something without framing it in? 

Now in England, I don't face much homophobia, but in Russia and Georgia, it was a big deal. For me, making queer bodies visible became important. Maybe because I was scared to be that queer person. I didn't feel powerful. My self esteem was low. Now, each day, I can be a new person, even if I don't have a name for that identity. And I find that fucking cool. I'm trying to find what's beyond the social structures shaped by language. I think new forms of connection and kinship are possible when we move outside fixed categories, like outside roles that tell us who’s supposed to hold power, even within queer spaces. That's why I rely more on affect, on presence, spontaneity, sensuality and the body itself. Queerness representation today can be depicted through these affective, rhizomatic connections between people. I don’t think that it’s something to define but rather something to live. Almost performative, something that resists being pinned down by names or labels, because otherwise it often ends up reinforcing norms. As Judith Butler explained, words don’t just describe who we are, they shape and sometimes limit us. So I try to keep things undefined, in motion, and porous. As for the erotic, there was so much stigma around sex and gender where I grew up. Everything was hidden from us. That probably shaped my interest in eroticism, but not in an obvious way. I don't think my work looks traditionally sexual, even though contemporary porn is a source of inspiration for me. It’s more about how bodies relate to one another outside of scripts. 

How do you imagine this might translate across time? If someone found one of your archived photos 100 years from now, what do you hope they would feel or understand, first? 

For me, art is a mirror. I don't want to be the kind of artist who says "This is what you must think when you look at my work". I believe in the death of the author. I want people to feel something freely, through their own experience. I'd hope that someone looking at my photos in 100 years would feel something about themselves. Maybe it would prompt them to think about how they live, how social systems shaped their actions or worldviews. I also think my work speaks to the time it's made in- maybe harsh, uncomfortable, problematic times. I try to create a kind of reality that is sexual, disturbing, romantic, apocalyptic. Not necessarily what's happening now, but a dream of now- a nightmare, maybe. Frightening and seductive at once.

Have you come across something recently that made you suddenly pause? Something that left you an imprint, like a personal punctum?

Yes, actually Barthes' Mythologies. I read it a long time ago during my studies, but it really resonates with me now. It's about working with modern myths- how things get called "natural” even though they're constructed. I'm trying to create my own mythologies in response. Barthes explains how to dismantle these accepted norms by replacing them with new ones, to show how arbitrary the old ones are. I love that. Recently, I've also become obsessed with light. I'm experimenting with basic torches, not traditional photo lights. It's a kind of "anti-professionalism" for me. Because professionalism often means following rules, repeating the same patterns. But being anti-that gives me freedom to play. 

I evoked the concept of Punctum, that one detail that wounds, stays in a photograph. As a photographer myself, knowing about this concept helped me see what I had been overlooking, not just in my own work but in art in general. Do you think about that when you shoot? 

I do think about Punctum a lot. Almost every image I create has it. It's what makes people feel, remember. That detail that sticks. I once showed my work in a program called Futures, where I studied, in the Netherlands. A tutor said "Your work is too intense. Every image is intense". Normally, editorials try to balance strong and calm images, but I want every image to be punctum. I want them to hit. Same with my music, it's intense, full on, I love that. 

I agree. Whether as a spectator or a generator, to borrow Barthes’ terms, I’m always chasing the same thing, a visceral reaction. I had one of your prints you gave me, left in my room for a while. One day, my mom walked in, saw it and said "What the fuck is that?". And I thought, yes! That's it, that's punctum. Not what shows, but what stirs. 

Exactly. That's why art is a mirror. I want people to receive it their own way.

And if your work is a mirror, what do you hope people see in it?

I'm inspired by fetishes and memes, porn and life, queer and alternative communities. In my artworks, I capture moments that seem to re-question situations and familiar routines. I want to shatter the ground of understanding to invite whoever interacts with my work to play with social roles and stereotypes of mass culture. To create new modern mythologies to expose and disarm those already existing. I hope for the people seeing my art that it’ll be an opportunity to re-question everything, everything that has been established, in our society.