In his interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, video, photography, and performative installations, Sascha Pohle reveals how materials and environments hold traces of cultural histories and collective experiences. His projects often take the form of collections or assemblages reminiscent of archaeological or anthropological exhibitions. Using found objects and everyday items, he reinterprets them in new contexts, transfers them to other media, or brings them to life in his films. Inspired by film and art history, Pohle reimagines familiar images and narrative structures to playfully intervene in the way we classify, interpret, and interact with the world around us. He often collaborates with local people on handcrafted objects, frequently employing a site-responsive approach.
The Song of Polysiren (video)
The video shows kindergarten children from the German School in Seoul playing with polystyrene. Their textbook explanation of plastic—referencing Alain Resnais' Le Chant du Styrène (1961)—is artificially amplified by a child's AI-generated voice, questioning plastic's broken promises amid waste and climate crises.
2025, 4K video, 7 min, b&w, sound, German with English subtitles
Liquid Grounds (video)
The video reanimates glass casts of an Amsterdam North floor as microscopic organisms—drifting singly or in groups against a black void, evoking blood cells, bacteria, or alien planets. The video abstracts domestic archaeology into micro-macro movements.
2023, 4K video, 19 min, silent, b&w, duration not fixed yet glas, dimensions variable, styrofoam light box
After The Gift - Blossfeldt's Fan
A slow-motion video weaves a mimetic play between Blossfeldt’s magnified plants and Chinese hand fans. Airflow from flipping fans turns pages of an enlarged photo book, revealing overlaps in shapes, patterns, and colors.
2016 /2021, HD Video, 25 min, 16:9, Color, Silent, Gift Giving Performance, Untitled, video 2.55 min, b&w, English with English captions
Statues also Die
Empty cardboard packages of electronic devices filmed against black. Light-shadow patterns reveal forms, angles, textures—evoking anthropological artifacts. Disposal objects re-animated, revalued, and endowed with fetish-like aura across five chapters.
2012, HD video transferred to 16 mm, 8.30 min, b&w, silent
Ornaments of Property (film)
Five-chapter film loop shows mural fragments from DVD/CD drives as "bricks." Discarded devices become fossil-like artifacts in modern ruins—panning architectures blending ancient ornamentation, morphing into spaceships against black. . Analog film contrasts digital voids, giving tech relics new life.
2015, 16 mm film loop, 8,30 min, color, silent
Statues also Die
2012
HD video transferred to 16 mm, 8.30 min, b&w, silent
Reframing the Artist
Fragments from fictional movies and biopics about artists are re-enacted by Dafen Oil Painting Village copy painters in their unmodified homes, studios, and shops. This fictional documentary questions artist stereotypes, copy/original binaries, and East-West encounters across authenticity, market, crisis, student, and model chapters.
2010, 35 min, HD DV, color, English with Mandarin Subtitles. various oil paintings on canvas, size variable
Noire et Blanche
Korean models hold artist-carved wooden replicas after Man Ray's "Noire et Blanche" in varied poses—solarized, cropped, mask-as-perfume flacon. Techniques evoke commodity fetishism and binary oppositions within global beauty industry exchanges.
2012, photographs, b/w, framed and mounted, various sizes wooden mask, painted
German Indian
Mixed-media installation on German "Hobbyism" or "Indianism" explores authorship, originality, exoticism, and authenticity through appropriation—redrawings, rephotographs, artifacts displayed as in an ethnographic museum.
2010, video, objects of various materials, 35 mm slides, 16 mm film, drawings
If I were you - Las Vegas New York Blackpool
A looping video traces three Robert De Niro impersonators across cities linked by uncanny replication: Blackpool mimicking Las Vegas, Las Vegas copying Manhattan’s skyline, New York holding Taxi Driver’s original sites. Referencing Scorsese’s mirror scene, it overlaps actor, character, and doubles.
2007/08, HD video, loop, 16,5 min, color, sound, English
The Mad Masters
Inspired by Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous, records acts by professional and aspiring celebrity imitators. Probes imitation’s identification with fame, media-driven desires to become other, linking celebrity culture and cinema to archaic rituals of power.
2008, HD video, 15 min, color, sound, English
7000 Cattle
8mm footage mimics amateur vacation clips at North Korean Kumgang's former tourist site, featuring Seoul yodelers singing Peter Hinnen’s "Siebentausend Rinder"—homeland forsaken for cattle-filled vistas. Evokes Hyundai's cattle gift, yodeling as rapprochement metaphor amid Sunshine Policy tourism to Diamond Mountains,
2006, 8 mm film transferred to video, 2.00 min, color, sound
Nomansland
Realized in a Croatian national park—former Yugoslav film set for 1960s Karl May Winnetou films. Guided to mined Tulove Grede mountains, video blends personal recordings with original footage. Fiction and reality intersect: romantic landscape turns haunted by memory and invisible postwar threat.
2004, video, 2.37 min, color, sound, c-print, color, 45 cm x 60 cm
The Swimmer
The video reenacts Burt Lancaster’s 1968 The Swimmer journey through sequential hotel pools on Tenerife, following a Thomas Cook holiday brochure. It documents a typology of pool architecture amid aging resorts and evokes melancholy in SD footage.
2002, video, 60 min, color, sound, travel broschure