IMERIUM

It's crazy. In the past, an empire was, of course, a world empire. The Imperium Romanum, the multi-ethnic empire that shaped European culture and gave it a common denominator. A lot has happened since then. Talking about a folk is completely outdated in our latitudes today. And because the term has been banished from our perception, it can exist neither in fact nor in the consciousness of others. "Man is the measure of all things." What used to refer to the human being as such now increasingly refers to the individual. The I, the self-referential perceiving, is the measure of all things. We need „me-time", we judge whether something fits "into my world" or not and we think "what is good for me, I know best myself". Like the Roman Empire, the inner empire can slide into decadence, can become a psychopathological mania. To escape decadence and ultimately madness, only one thing helps: to raise the measure to the measure of all things. The measure that, like a seesaw, brings the respective conflicting poles into balance. Inside and outside, subject and object, pragmatism and idealism, economy and morality, I and we.

The characters that Undine Bandelin shows us are far away from this. With each figure, be it through the posture, the facial expression or even the accompanying accessories, it becomes clear that self-perception is not balanced. "How I want to be, how I feel, that's how I am and no doubt that's how I am perceived." Undinen Bandelin demonstrates this credo of our culture, which tends towards narcissism and egomania, by showing it to us. Naked, conveyed primarily through body language, or dressed, through "dressing up", she shows people who have somehow lost touch with reality. She shares this knowledge with the viewer. And not only that. She gives whole frames of reference, along the lines of "how could it come to this, that I only lose myself in my reflection and am not reflected in my fellow human beings and my living world." In the process, Undine Bandelin is not stingy with the back stories of the psychopathology of her pictorial subjects.https://www.thegrassisgreener.de/startseite.html#