2020 — ongoing. Series of digital colour photographs, published in »a loop of choices«, publication of the photography class, Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, page 30 to 40, publication date: March 2021, number of copies: 100, printed on FSC natural paper.

2020 Video-Installation: screens, carpet, glass and mirror smartphones, MA1 jacket, marbles, chain, marble, plexiglass box, flash drive, »I am an artist*« pin, charger, sunglasses, electrical wire on a reel, balaclavas. Two channel video-loop (each 03:40 min). Exhibition view: »turn of the tide« exhibition on the occasion of the Futur 3 Festival Kiel

»Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites.« (Read; 2018) — Through a dialogic approaches, our related subjects are united in this two channel video installation. The idiosyncratic narrative tries to describe everyday turnarounds that usually go unnoticed. The interplay with these boundaries (and their reversal) is adopted in the spatial arrangement. In addition to commonalities in content, formal aspects of digital cultural techniques are addressed through the manipulation of digital surfaces.

2019 — ongoing. A series of screenshot-compositions. Exhibition view: »contact« group bibbloard exhibition in the city area of Kiel (2020).

Focusing on phenomena of the presentation of self in everyday life and the question what part the real-time frame-medium »Internet« plays in this context, this work is dedicated to a special form of digital staging. This includes live webcams and especially sex webcams. The Focus lies on the arising elusive situation. The viewer is confronted with an overwhelming array of stagings and windows from all over the world. They allow a glance into supposedly private housing-situation. The screen recording has been used to capture a brief moment in which no person was in the picture. The fluid real-time image has become a photographic snapshot. The Internet has become a place of self- and external representation with elusive, ambiguous boundaries between private and public spaces.

2020. A series of screenshot-compositions. Exhibition view: »contact« group bibbloard exhibition in the city area of Kiel.

Fleckstein contrasts anonymity with prominence and self-presentation in social networks. By including one's own self-image (selfie), as well as using the aesthetics of social software interfaces, the romanticised image of the uniformed individual is to be negated.

2019 Installation: Various screens, revolving stage, high lift truck, cable drum. Video loops (7:05, 05:49 and 04:33 min). Exhibition view: »Gottfried Brockmann Preis« at Stadtgalerie, Kiel

»[...] Artistic metaphors of reflection and self-representation appear often in his work. There is an echoing of parallel worlds, of superimpositions, doubled, reversed and negative images, whose quick movement recalls the rhythm of pop media landscapes, glistening with mirrored sculptural surfaces. Yet it is the weight of the human body which is at the center of [this] work, as a dancer, as a ghost, a lover, an object of war or a simulation of identity culled from the internet. The body as mediated image pulsating with themes of violence and sensuality becomes a site for the negotiation and construction of individual identity and the nature of representation itself. It is in his most recent work, »Deus Ex Machina« that Hannes Fleckstein effectively refines his ideas in a complex installation involving an industrial loading cart, a power cable reel and digital display screens in varying sizes playing sound and film loops in differing states of polymorphic manipulation. An autobiographic face, alternatively appearing with a mask or in negative, on a retro cell phone, looping through transformations and permutations at multiple angles and perspectives. The industrial metallic cart functions as both container and prop, supporting the displays and delineating the surrounding space. The installation is at the same time threatening and strangely familiar: these are the tools of self-optimization and digital narrative. It is a work which draws one inside while remaining at a critical distance.« Extract from the text by Arnold Dreyblatt for the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition. ISBN 978-3927979-94-9

2019 Installation: Two screens, white curtain, black ventilator. Video loops (04:00 and 05:50 min) Exhibition view: »66. Landesschau BBK SH« at Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig

This work is committed to various questions of identity: How do we define and present ourselves, how do we communicate these identities in digital spheres? Fake lifestyle in social media is becoming the norm, the pressure of self-optimisation is turning into an overkill and the simulated perfection is transforming individuals into performative identities. Once everyone can display, shape and change their own faces, everyone becomes a star in their own reality show. Have those identities now reached a new peak or are there other goals they will reach with their digital performance? Starting from these questions, we think about our own digital narrative. The excess of perfect postings evokes a desire for trash, naivety and ugliness.

2019 — ongoing. Collaborative projec. Detailed information under memeclassworldwi.de and on Instagram memeclassworldwid and mcww.club

memeclassworldwide is an autonomous class initiated by Ramona Kortyka, Mateusz Dworczyk and Juan Blanco within the art academy. The starting point for this project was Dworczyks bachelor thesis (»Memes, the digital instigator: The social quality of the comic based on an internet phenomenon.«) in 2019.
Since then the artists organize research retreats, exhibitions, courses and workshops. Based on the Internet as a reference space, the class investigates post digital phenomena across their aesthetic, social and political dimensions, and integrating these investigations into practices of teaching and exhibiting. memeclassworldwide also collaborates with Bernhard Garnicnig, a PhD researcher involved in the project »Institutions as a Way of Life« (Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at Academy of Art and and Design in Basel).
In picture: Videostills from »memeclassworldwide video tutorial dokumentation«, contribution to the exhibition »escaleras futuras« in Galeria Santa Fe, Bogotá

2020. A serie of analog large format portraits.

2019. Installation: photogrammetric texture, 3D printed carnation, mirror base and found footage video collage (01:10 min). Exhibition view: Offspace Flämische Straße, Kiel

Proceeding from Dianthus I (2018), this work expands the investigation on the sign towards a general question of the referentiality. The carnation is used as a sign in very different contexts and social classes for centuries. In „Dianthus II“ the flower is presented as a 3D object. It is stripped of its nature, digitised and medially doubled. By being placed on the mirror base, the relationship between the technical copy and its reflection is addressed. The found footage was subjected to a similar treatment: It was cropped and reassembled, so that the origin and the context of the image remain hidden. With this formal and medial interplay, the work tries to point towards a lack of reference systems since modernity.

2019. In collaboration with Thies Warnke. Installation: Stage elements, evaluation sheets for the annual exhibition, ballot box with integrated paper shredder. Exhibition view: Main entrance of the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design during the annual exhibition.

This work is a participatory spatial installation that humorously questions the value of a critical voice in institutional, discursive and democratic contexts.The installation plays with perspective and expectations: Like a stage set, this sacral arrangement loses its appearance as soon as you look behind the scenes. The ballot box, in turn, denies the prospect of a habitual way of dealing with the right to vote. By offering the possibility of participation the work addresses all members of educational and cultural institutions such as universities, museums or galleries, as well as visitors to these institutions.

2016 — ongoing. Texts and collages: paper, pencil, fine liner, felt pen, photographs, typewriter.

»es gibt die dinge, von denen ich weiß, dass ich sie weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich weiß, dass ich sie nicht weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich nicht weiß, dass ich sie weiß. es gibt die dinge, von denen ich nicht weiß, dass ich sie nicht weiß.«

2019. In collaboration with Kristin Neve. Transcription of the eponymous sound art work.. ISBN 978-3-943763-80-5

»The artist's publication is the transcription of the eponymous sound art work for which Hannes Fleckstein recorded conversations with people who are on the fringes of society through the consumption of alcohol or drugs in Kiel Gaarden. Just like the soundtracks, the writing is fragmented and superimposed. Through the readable excerpts the viewer only gets an atmospheric impression of the content but cannot decipher it completely. Only by opening the bag it is possible to access the contained sheets. This symbolises the intrusion into the private sphere of the people depicted in the work. The leaves can be folded into a sheet. While a white border at the top and left side marks the beginning, there is no recognisable end.« Photograps and text by Kristin Neve

2018. Installation: fresh flowers, urine, cellophane bags, tape, dipping wax. Picture: Digital colour photography »Selfportrait With Carnation« and video loops. Exhibition view: Museumsnacht, ALTE MU Kiel.

Throughout history, the floral symbol of the carnation has undergone more than one about-turn: from the peasant symbol of honour and love, via a resistance symbol of the nobility during the French Revolution, to the sign of the labour movement. The work attempts to detach the sign from its connotations and to renew the flower's description. In the course of this the emphasis is put on the special relationship beetween the portrait oft the flower and the artist's self-portrait. The carnation becomes the catalyst for a dialogue between two artists with different nationalities from working class families.

2018. Series of six analogue colour photographs.

Pulling. Scuffling. Pushing. Tussling. That's our idea of wrestling. But with children and teenagers the training situation looks a little different. Far from Olympic professionalism, the youngsters struggle with their playful impartiality, discipline, rivalry and friendship. The aim of the work is to translate these impressions into a series of pictures and to capture a moment that goes beyond the mere representation of sport. On the one hand, the focus is on the physical contact of the young people, which is a characteristic of this ritualised close-quarter fight. On the other hand, the ambivalent situation between empathic togetherness and the will to win has to be balanced out.

2017 — 2018. Digital Video-Sound-Collage using found footage, own film material and self-composed sound (5:47 min). Exhibition view: Offspace Flämische Straße, Kiel.

Photographs and videos from social networks, news, online portals and feature films that show the everyday media world and subtly try to undermine reality. Through alienation and editing, the images are ripped from their predetermined form and mixed with their own footage.

2017. Video Performance: water, used slip (loop of 00:34 min). Exhibition view: Offspace Flämische Straße, Kiel.

It is what it is. A wet dream. It is what it is...

2015. In collaboration with Anne Sensel. Sound Installation: 3 cardboard boxes, speakers, Players and sound tracks. Exhibition view: Offspace Schlecker, Kiel-Gaarden.

Boxes isolate and dissect conversations with people in Kiel Gaarden who have experienced exclusion from society, for example through family misfortunes or drug consumption. The presentation in individual boxes is an attempt to reflect the vacuum in which these people are situated. In each box, different soundtracks can be heard. In these, Fragments of words are condensed through repetition and overlapping in order to reveal the reasons for their misfortunes.

2014 — 2016. Experimental film (5:21 min).

The film consists of two different image layers, a positive and a negative one. Various rectangular objects are projected in the rhythm of the sound symbolising vein-like lines. An almost threatening hole appears between them, nothingness. A thunderous, electrifying sound, sometimes reminiscent of the sounds of a violin counter, sets the scenario into music.