essays – joerg alexander

Les Protégés – Fragments of Hope and Despair

“They do not know their roles – yet the world does.” Each figure carries a name, but the name is not protection — it is expectation. The women are archetypes — Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Ophelia, Viola, Beatrice — and yet they are counter-images of themselves. They speak — but often without a voice.

Les Protégés – Fractures without Origin

“Not all drama bleeds. Some stays quiet. And waits.” The names disappear, the quotes fall silent. What remains is the everyday – kitchens, animals, patches of light on skin. The drama hasn’t vanished, it has seeped into the banal. They are silent carriers of a tension that does not explode, but endures. They show that there is a role even without a costume – and that many do not find themselves in dramas, but in routines they were never written out of.

Les Protégés – An American Fable

These solitary figures and pivotal scenes reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramas, exploring the boundary between reality and imagination. Each image captures moments charged with tension, where hope meets despair and strength confronts vulnerability.

Pursuit of Happiness

Pursuit of Happiness constructs a radically stylized visual world — between mirrors and skulls, longing and surface. An aesthetic that exists somewhere between Hades and haute couture. The protagonists are icons of illusion. Staged bodies enclosed in vitrines of darkness and sheen. What they think remains their own. What they feel is reflected in light, in surfaces, in metallic skulls — never spoken. Merely suggested.

No Man’s Journey

What if no one is watching? What if no one remembers the attempt? When a journey has no witness, and no arrival - is it still a journey, or just a disappearance?

Lolita

She is not the story. She is the screen. A nation looks at her and sees itself: young, pure, untouchable. But behind the eyes— a history undone, a guilt renamed, a hunger never questioned.

Marisol

The Invisible Space That Shapes Us - This essay reflects on how we navigate between these invisible spaces: the hope for what is to come and the melancholy of what has been lost. The various figures are not mere representations of ideas — they are mirrors of our inner experiences. One question remains: How does the invisible—the things we hope for and the things we have lost—shape our being?

Raven

The images show a half-lit, seemingly abandoned house—its corners echoing with silence—where a single figure sits, shadowed by a raven. The presence of the bird, and the echo of its whisper—Nevermore—anchor the work in Poe’s landscape of longing, loss, and inescapable memory. Here, memory is no longer a soft cocoon but a voice that returns again and again, refusing closure.

In the Void

Sometimes, everything begins with light: cold, focused, unrelenting. In that moment—between sedation and awareness—there is a strange clarity. The medical world does not appear here as a backdrop, but as a language of its own: sterile, but never empty; distant, yet saturated with human proximity. A system of machines, hands, and glances—where every detail matters, and every silence speaks.

Precarious Self

The self appears as a provisional structure – shaped by encounters, overlaps, chance. Never finished, always re-balanced. In its very fragility lies the power to reinvent. Every tiny shift in this precarious balance cracks open new rooms of possibility within us.

Defying Gravity

Too carefully assembled - too polished to be real, too familiar to be false. The mask begins as a dream: part armor, part invitation. Here, it takes the form - absurd, elegant, unsettling. A horse’s head, worn like a question. Someone is inside. But is it truly you - or just the self we always longed to become?

In Times of no Solace

Step back, look, feel, move on. Pain meets light, intimacy meets distance. Yesterday hope, today fatigue, tomorrow maybe lift-off. Compassion is radical. The images speak; you decide what they’re saying. In a world stuck on maximum volume, a single face stands still - compassion as the most subversive act left.