SEBASTIAN FORKARTH

Sebastian Forkarth (*1985 in Herdecke, Germany) studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld and the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts, Jerusalem.

Observing national forms of appropriating architecture and urban space and the process of nation building is often limited on the consequences of armed conflicts. On the long run the process of shifting borders and populations in order to create ethnical homogenous spaces is visually widely neglected. In my photographic approach I am abandoning the sphere of day to day politics, Instead I am asking which methods and symbols foster the idea of a nation, how a national memory is constructed and which relationship can be drawn between (re)location and the process of nation building.

Hence I am globally dealing with spaces that represent the features of a distinct national identity or legitimising (re)construct these afterwards. Rather than looking on phenomenons as exclusive regional processes, my work is pointing out similarities of human communities related to general principals of power, control and partisanship.