The Masks of the Gods (Die Masken der Götter)

In a globalised world where history, myths and legends find their way across cultures, the mummery and its narrative no longer belongs to a particular national heritage. Narrations change depending on the narrator and a visual world is also redefined and expanded. When the past is reinterpreted in pop culture, it no longer has much to do with its origins, but sets its accents and forms a new fictional narrative. Image worlds are no longer bound by national borders, but become common property, a gigantic open source database that everyone can freely use.The narrator shifts the meaning of the respective details and thus forms new attributions. This phenomenon is not new, but has only expanded through fast and mass communication. In ancient times, people developed new hybrid beings by combining different narratives.The interpretation of the same mythical creatures can vary greatly in different cultural circles and fluctuates between positive and negative attribution.Today, this phenomenon can be discovered in all creative industries, especially in character design for video games, literature, cartoons or the film industry.

In my latest series I try to intensify this process by creating my own myths using  digital image collages, creating new Wolpertinger. I work with photographic archive material from various countries to intensify the mixing of cultures. An interplay of the most diverse meanings, bundled in one figure, which is robbed of its original meaning and repeatedly encoded anew. Like Frankenstein's monster, I assemble each figure piece by piece until a mannequin is created, which I dress and equip like an avatar. In this series, East meets West, old meets modern, reality meets fiction, creating a new narrative.


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Steve Braun

Die Masken der Götter

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