"I’m currently installing an exhibition in Frankfurt, part of Because I Live Here, a group show at the MMK, in the middle of the banking district. The installation is called 14 Words and, for it, I’ve transported a 90s flower store from East Germany to Frankfurt. After rebuilding it, I will fill it with objects: no flowers, only empty vases. The group exhibition looks to racism in Germany, going back to the 1970s. I’ve been looking back to the roots of contemporary white supremacism and a neo-Nazi group known as the Order, who were active in the US in the 1980s. One of the group’s founding members, David Lane, established the Fourteen Words, a set of slogans derived from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that have formed the basis of white supremacism. The most famous slogan is: “We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.”

The store I’m building in Frankfurt will speak about the ideology of the Fourteen Words – this idea that some white people think they are in an eternal racial war, to create a “clean” society. It also refers to the killings of the NSU, which often killed people in their stores, shooting owners behind their desks. Their first victim was a flower seller named Enver Şimşek, who was killed in Nuremberg in 2000. The empty vases that will fill this store are white, some with holes in them, and which look like they have been shot, or pierced. I’m interested in this tension, this material violence." *