Julius von Bismarck
OOOSB Series (2024-2025)

The title of Julius von Bismarck’s new work series OOOSB is a play on the acronym of Oriented Strand Board (OSB), a cheap building material, and the posthumanist concept of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). OOO describes humans, non-humans, and immaterial constructs—for instance, concepts—as objects that are only partially perceptible due to the limits of perception. The underlying hypothesis that every object has its own reality, independent of humans, allows for a conception of existence in which human supremacy is precarious. “Perhaps it takes facing the inhuman within us before compassion—suffering together with, participating with, feeling with, being moved by—can be lived. How would we feel if it is by way of the inhuman that we come to feel, to care, to respond?” (Karen Barad: On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am). In his OOOSB series, von Bismarck presses animals, plants, and vestiges of civilization into a mass of wood shavings using heavy industrial compression techniques. The artist presses worlds in which the history of the material merges with that of the pictorial worlds into the panels. Julius von Bismarck is renowned for his critical engagement with the relationship between humans and nature, which in his work is often depicted in complex and ambivalent ways. At the center lies the questioning of human concepts of nature—sometimes understood as a fragile environment in need of protection, at other times as a force of brutal violence. The compressed world of these panel works destabilizes the hierarchy between human and nature, opening a new perspective on the intricate interplayof culture, memory, and environment.