Jakob Urban

How would you describe your artistic practice?

I work in many different media and often articulate my way of working around specific ideas, themes, and concepts that I am thinking through. I’m interested in taking specific artefacts, especially those relating to queer cultures, both past and present, and abstracting them into formal works that open themselves up for different interpretations, expanding beyond their initial contexts.

I’m looking at secret languages, visual codes, activism and protests, literature, and even dating apps and memes to extract specific parts that I then rework into more abstract works that rarely tell you where exactly they’re coming from.

I feel like abstraction feels much more queer than the representation that a lot of queer art focuses on: It offers a fluidity, an openness and a formlessness that the use of the term “queer” stands for, to me.

What concepts appear consistently in your practice?

What always comes back is a reflection around desire in a very broad sense. I feel like it is a site of tension in which a lot of different aspects of the human condition come together. Of course there’s always a sexual connotation to that term, and I am interested in erotics in an expanded sense, but desire really designs our daily lives and has for so long.

You can think of advertising, as much as of religion and spirituality as ways in which desire shapes the ways in which we interact both with each other and the world around us. Of course, I am looking at that from a queer lense so I often relate these questions back to political ideas, and to the freedom that “thinking queerly” can offer regarding both artistic practice and one’s own situation in the world we live in.

What techniques or materials do you frequently use?

It’s funny, I was talking to a friend not long ago and she said I seem to work a lot with shiny surfaces. I think there’s an immediate attraction that emanates from them. Maybe that’s subconsciously what I’m drawn to: Attractive surfaces. Materials that lure you in.

I’d say I have a very sensual approach to that, making something that somehow even at its most physical and with all conceptual aspects removed, feels attractive and to in turn think critically about why that is and what that means for me.