Popping up

Popping Up
Public intervention (Billboard) Bielefeld, DE. © Kavachi 2026
Photo by Luca Finkl
Popping Up is a photography-based work initiated in 2019 in Coburg during a cycling tour undertaken by the artist together with friends. The project was revisited and reenacted in 2025 in a wheat field in Grub am Forst, where the artist had lived for four years. The chosen site holds personal significance: a hill close to his former home, shaped by daily routines of walking and jogging, and by encounters with local wildlife—rabbits and roe deer—whose sudden appearances and disappearances informed the gesture at the center of the work.
In the photograph, a naked body bends forward and partially disappears into the dense wheat field, leaving only a rounded form visible above the surface of the crop. The action oscillates between hiding and appearing, humor and vulnerability, presence and absence. The body becomes difficult to identify at first glance—neither fully human nor clearly animal—echoing the fleeting visibility of creatures that momentarily emerge from the landscape before vanishing again.
Popping Up reflects on camouflage as both a natural and social condition. The work engages questions of visibility and concealment in relation to queerness, suggesting that blending in, hiding, or suddenly appearing can function as strategies of survival, protection, or self-expression. The body is presented not as a fixed identity but as something that shifts depending on context, perception, and environment.
In 2026, the work evolved into a public intervention in the form of a large-scale billboard in Bielefeld, realized during the artist’s residency at Artists Unlimited. Installed in the urban environment, the image entered everyday public space and encountered viewers outside the gallery context. Many passersby interpreted the figure as a pig—or sometimes as a rock—a common reading that underscores the instability of perception and the role of projection in how bodies are seen in public space.