Fabian Knecht

Fabian Knecht is a German artist. He was born in Magdeburg, Germany. Knecht lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Arts Berlin, the California Institute Of The Arts, and the Ale School of Fine Arts, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 2009 to 2014 Knecht has been a participant in the Institut für Raumexperimente, Olafur Eliasson’s class at the University of Arts Berlin. He graduated as Meisterschüler in 2014. In 2012, Knecht worked for video and performance artist Matthew Barney in New York. With his art, he pursues a consistent path, one which causes irritation, which marks an exceptional state in the current of everyday life, and which scratches at societal mindsets. This is expressed in his precisely positioned, temporary actions, which he realises at specific, sometimes historically connoted locations in urban space or in boundary areas. The boundaries between White Cube and habitat are dissolved, the museum as a mausoleum is converted into a power plant. Knecht maintains the hope that art is a means to break power and authority, that art can take paths beyond convention. His art stands in our way, sharpens our senses and combines the imperative assertion of an exclamation mark with the Socratic question mark that places everything in question. Art is his route out into the world, a provocative commentary in defiance of emptiness, nothingness and decadence. The German titles of his actions arise from of the nominalisation of the verbs describing the respective action with the suffix _UNG. In the process, more important than a futuristic utopia is a liberating RestrukturierUNG (restructuring) in the now; Knecht’s form of artistic activism doesn’t want to make things better (Groys), but instead strives to dissolve the separating contours between the lived in world and the sphere of art, and to inspire contemplation of one’s own position and of that which could be normality.