Frames

Spielraum (Berlin, 2005) was a gallery, a club, and a community in one room. It was the first frame and the prototype for every frame that followed: a hybrid format that refused to choose between exhibition and event, between art and life, between artist and audience. The question it asked was the simplest one: how does art circulate? And the answer it built was a room where that circulation could happen on its own terms.

CRE8 Foundation (2011–2018) began as a four-month residency at Ramana’s Garden Orphanage in Rishikesh and grew into a seven-year project of children’s art workshops across more than forty countries. The methodology was collaboration as the work itself, with the workshop as substrate and the exhibition as residue. Ping Pong Painting across twenty-plus countries: the artist draws, the child draws, the artist draws, the child draws, until the work emerges. The Most Realistic Alien (started in 2009) made every child a co-author, every drawing credited by name and country. Didac, age 5, Spain. Marinela, age 9, Tokyo. Karen Sofia, age 10, Colombia. The works were exhibited at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and elsewhere. Run with seven or eight people across multiple geographies, on a donation-based funding model that proved structurally exhausting.

CRE8 closed in 2018. The lesson was direct: a frame that depends on someone else’s continued enthusiasm is a frame on loan. Frames have to hold their own weight or they aren’t frames — they’re someone else’s project with the artist’s name on it. The lesson became infrastructure. The frames built after 2018 were built differently.

The frame is not infrastructure for the artwork. It is the artwork at a different magnitude, built because the artwork’s question required it.

AIR Open Artist Residency began in downtown Ubud in 2013: six units and one giant shared 300m² studio, where artists share the studio and meals and one unit has its own kitchen. In 2018, the same logic was built in Trancoso, Bahia — three years in Brazil, then handed on. What the frame provides is what every artist needs and almost no institution will provide without conditions attached — time, space, structure, and silence to make their own work in.

Some artists need more quiet and a studio of their own. AIR Temple (Desa Kenderan, twelve minutes from Ubud) was built for them — four houses beside a thousand-year-old water temple, near Tegalalang, a waterfall, a river, and rice paddies, in a small local Balinese village away from the tourism center, still close enough to reach everything Ubud offers. Same frame, same refusal to attach conditions, different format. Both run under one website.

UKENA (2020–) is a wearable artwork distributed across bodies, with a seven-layer chain of authorship that names the wearer as co-author. I AM YOU (electronic music label co-founded with Deer Jade in 2024) is a stack of named collaborations—including AI as one collaborator among several—with the human hand-mark made mandatory and visible. UNFUCK YOUR CREATIVITY (book, 2024) is twenty years of the methodology in one form. CINIS (2026) is a wedding artwork structured as a legal contract.

The practice operates in the tradition of Joseph Beuys’s erweiterter Kunstbegriff (the expanded concept of art), which holds that art is not limited to objects in galleries but extends across social forms, institutions, pedagogy, and the structures of daily life. The frames are how that expansion is made operational. They are not illustrations of a theory. They are the practice applying that logic at a different scale.

I do not call these side projects. I do not call them biography. I do not call them brand extensions. I built them because the studio practice required structural autonomy to remain honest, because the gallery system is one venue among several and not the only legitimating one, because new ideas only happen in combination with something else, and because the future is more direct: artists with their own audiences, fewer middlemen, less gatekeeping, more conversation across more surfaces. The frames are how the work happens. They are also part of what the work is.