Since the mid-1990s, Alexander Steig has created video installations in which the image is transmitted live, in the room and in real time. He is interested in how the surface of the image and the surrounding space can be extended by a further dimension: time. He examines classic subjects such as landscape, portrait and architecture directly on site.

Many of his works revolve around control and observation: the line between care and surveillance, between public and private, and the loss of intimacy that we sometimes accept and sometimes fail to notice. For each project, he researches the history of the place and responds to what has happened there. His means are simple: models, displays, found objects, archival material.

Steig’s installations have something theatrical about them. They are made to last a set time: their run is the length of the exhibition, and the opening is a premiere. Objects become props; light and media form the stage. What remains is the memory of it, and often a publication documenting the project.

Since 2018, the Hannover-trained painter and sculptor has turned his attention to the pebbles of the rivers he lives by: the Leine in Hannover, the Isar in Munich, the Inn in Wasserburg, and the fjord in Akureyri, Iceland.

The Isar flows just a few steps from his apartment. Since the river was renaturalised in 2009, gravel banks have appeared and disappeared between Praterinsel and Flaucher, depending on water levels and currents. On his walks there, Steig looks for stones, out of a sculptor’s interest more than a geologist’s. Colour, shape and size are what count.

Anyone who picks up a pebble by the river may think of Heraclitus: everything flows. If nothing lasts, then a pebble’s uniqueness is also temporary, until it is ground down to sand. “What appears identical is usually only similar,” says Steig. And identity can also simply be claimed: an Isar pebble might just as well have come from a gravel works in Lower Saxony or from Scandinavia.

But you can also simply enjoy it: a sea of stones along the shore, and that one wet, glistening pebble in your hand.

Until now, Steig has translated his pebbles into images with camera and video, studying their volume, their polish and their shadows. For Ausbelichtet, he set the camera aside. The image formed directly on the leather, over months, through sun and shade.

For Steig, a pebble is an object that its surroundings have worked on over an unimaginably long time. It shows no traces of its journey. It is the trace. This is what connects it to our natural leather, which takes on its owner’s story with every use. Each piece in the edition thus tells of two encounters: one with the stone, and one with the person who carries it.

Alexander Steig, born in Hannover in 1968, lives and works as an artist and curator in Munich and Berlin. Since the mid-1990s, he has realised more than 300 projects, exhibitions and curatorial works in Germany and over twenty other countries, from Iceland to Japan, supported by more than 50 grants, residencies and fellowships. He teaches, publishes and does volunteer work in cultural policy, including with BBK München, Kunstraum München and Akademieverein München.

More about his work: www.alexandersteig.de