Jannis Köllner, Texts

Thoughts on surfaces

By Eigil Bakdal Jorgensen

A package came through the mail today. Inside it was a fifty-millimeter steel ball. It was perfectly polished like a mirror. The person who received it could see themselves in the reflection of the ball. They could actually see almost the whole room they were standing in reflected in the steel ball. Their face was slightly distorted, as if captured through a fish-eye lens, and when holding it in their hand, the reflections of their fingertips took up half of the tiny image formed on the spherical surface.

When looking into the ball, they were reminded of something their dad once told them. If you take a photo of a ball with a reflective surface, you can then use that photo in a 3D program to perfectly replicate the lighting of whatever room or area you were in when you took it. By “unwrapping” the mirrored ball so that you are technically inside it, all the reflections, highlights, and shadows of every 3D object placed in that scene will be perfectly replicated as they would be in the room where you took the original photo. In this case, the dim hallway where the person stood, looking at the ball.

Looking at the fingertips meeting the surface of the cold, smooth steel ball, the person lingered on the contrasting textures of the different materials. In a 3D program, these textures would have been flat images wrapped around the surface of the model of the hands and the steel ball. The ball's surface is a difficult, but fairly possible, shape to map out. We have seen it on a globe. The surface of a person is a bit more difficult. All the way from the fingertips down to between the toes is one cohesive surface. How far up into the nose counts as surface on a person? If you were a tiny animal crawling around on the surface of a human, would you even notice the difference between an arm and up the nose?

The person wondered how far you would have to stick a pencil up a nostril for it to be considered inside the body, and thought about another time they saw a CPR dummy (the kind you train mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on) turned inside out, where the nostrils and the mouth normally would be, three long fleshy tubes emerged instead, about half a meter long. The inside of the mouth and nose goes deep on a dummy like that.

If a tiny animal were to crawl all the way across the person’s body, it would eventually pass onto the clothing, making the clothes part of the same surface. The animal would start on the lower back, then crawl all the way up under the T-shirt (still on the skin), then at the collar (where the skin and the T-shirt meet) crawl onto the inside of the T-shirt and go all the way down again, then out onto the outside of the T-shirt and up, finally reaching the head of the person. If you turned a person wearing a T-shirt inside out, the open space between the T-shirt and the skin would become a positive space and stick out like the mouth of the CPR dummy.

The route of the animal illustrated in grey to proof the one cohesive surface of cloth and body

Repetition and the Self

By Tristan Kold

Repetition is often understood as a force that erodes the singularity of the self. To repeat a gesture or an image is to loosen its attachment to a stable “I,” allowing it to appear as part of a larger, impersonal process.

Jannis Kdllner’s series of self-portraits initially seems to follow this logic. Yet in relation to the title Asche auf mein Haupt (“ashes upon my head”), repetition takes on a different function. The phrase refers to the Christian ritual of Ash Wednesday, in which ashes are marked on the forehead as a sign of repentance and a reminder of human mortality “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” In this context, repetition does not dissolve the self, but returns it to itself. It is an act of acknowledgment that fixes the individual within their own moral and existential condition.

This dynamic becomes more pointed when considering the material circumstances under which the drawings were produced. In this context, repetition operates as a structure through which the self persists. Not as a unified essence, but as something that insists on returning, resisting dissolution into a purely material experience of alienation.

Such a reading stands in tension with philosophical traditions in which repetition functions as a path toward transcendence. A concept that I initially ascribed to the works. In the thought of thinkers like Ibn Arabi and Adi Shankara, repetition serves to dissolve the apparent autonomy of the individual, revealing an underlying unity of existence. By contrast, in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche, repetition can be understood as an intensification of life as it is demanding that the subject affirm its existence within finite conditions rather than transcend

The work does not resolve this opposition. Instead, it sustains a tension between two movements: a pull toward unity and a return to fragmentation. This dynamic recalls the thought of Plotinus, where the self oscillates between the desire for unity and the constraints of embodied existence. Yet even this distinction proves insufficient if the metaphysical and the concrete are not separate domains, but fundamentally entangled.

The significance of the work lies precisely here. Repetition neither simply dissolves the self nor secures it. It reveals a condition in which both movements are inseparable. Unity does not appear beyond the material, but within it, encompassing both transcendence and lived experience.

The self does not disappear. But it does not remain the same.