Academic final project, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Loggings (logging bad deeds): Felix Adam, Liora Epstein, Susanne Schoenberg, Malin Speicher

Materials:
Textiles, studio lighting, bar with furnishings, domestic furniture, printed matter, mannequins, window film, laser-cut fabric elements, book editions, found objects

Dimensions:
Dimensions variable

Realized with the kind support of Party Rent Group and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus

dispersed non-existence, Liora Epstein’s final project at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, unfolds as a staged environment in which temporal registers collapse. Visitors entering the space encounter a constellation of objects, figures, and light that refuses linear narration. Past, present, and future appear not as distinct categories but as overlapping conditions within a single spatial arrangement.

At the center of the installation stands a functional bar titled die sogenannte Gegenwart (the so-called present). Around it, five clothed mannequins mark figures from different temporal and ideological contexts. Four of them correspond to the four people who write logging bad deeds — Felix Adam, Liora Epstein, Susanne Schoenberg, and Malin Speicher — while a fifth figure stands outside that group. Epstein designs the costumes and garments in her installations, drafts the patterns, and sews them herself.

The entries of logging bad deeds are distributed across the bar and a secondary seating area, Die sozialistische Ecke (The socialist corner). The hand-bound books that hold them are called loggings. Rather than offering coherent biographies, they assemble fragments of worldview, contradiction, and self-description.

Coloured studio lighting and tinted window films produce an artificial atmosphere that modulates perception. Zones of heightened clarity alternate with areas of visual opacity, lending the space a suspended, dreamlike quality. The lighting operates less as illumination than as a structuring device, shaping attention and spatial orientation.

A bartender periodically activates the bar, serving drinks. While the gesture suggests hospitality and pause, it functions primarily as part of the installation’s scenography. Consumption, reading, and observation occur simultaneously, yet without resolving into genuine social exchange. The polished surface of the setting contrasts with the content of the loggings, which subtly destabilize the notion of a stable present and expose its constructed, ambivalent nature.

The bar later became an independent work, The Bar, shown at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld in 2024.

Image 1, 2, 4 Installation view dispersed non-existence, 2023
Image 3 Die sozialistische Ecke (The socialist corner), 2023
courtesy Kunstmuseen Krefeld (DE)
Photos by Ivo Faber

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn