Alexandra Bircken. 1986 Buchkatalog

For my artist's book for the Secession, I reproduced my diary calendar from 1986, the year I was eighteen. The calendar is full of dense handwritten entries that obsessively revolve around questions of my identity. Finding myself was what it was about. Which man? Daniel, Olli, Arnd? My math teacher? No one? Passages that now strike me as too private were blacked out in the process. Today's digital trace masks the analogue trace from decades ago. The censorship becomes a graphical addition, a drawing that pulls together the two different periods of time, separated by thirty-three years." (Alexandra Bircken)