Tobias Heine’s artistic work repeatedly touches on questions relating to the concept of the image and the aspects of its origin, nature and perception, which he addresses in drawings, videos, installations and sculptural objects.
In Stalker he works with lined A4 ring binder inserts under extreme conditions: he immerses them in water, wrings them out, coats them with oil paint, soaks them again, dyes them again. What remains is the result of all these treatments, dirty-looking pages, almost decayed. Their texture demonstrates a very unique object character. The everyday object is inscribed with a treatment process, it becomes something that wants to elude a too-precise classification. This is also referred to by the title-giving film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky. Just like the film, and with their decrepit materiality, the pages take up the border as an open space and tell of being “driven to the limit”—while at the same time dreaming beyond it.