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.

SKINS are fabric prints and weavings of abstract patterns derived from forensic SEM images of skin remains on Korean K-Pop group TVXQ’s stage costumes, inspired by the refrain “Under my Skin” from their 2008 song “Mirotic.”

2024, digital prints, polyester, various sizes, woven fabric, cotton, 200 x 150 cm

The Song of Polysiren

An installation of black glass objects—shaped from Jeju styrofoam waste with coastal rock textures—displayed on remodeled buoys, paired with a video of children exploring polystyrene's sounds and forms.

2024, colored glass, styrofoam light box, variable dimensions, 4K video, 7 min, b&w, sound, German with English subtitles

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—is artificially amplified by an AI voice, questioning plastic's promises amid waste and climate crises.

2025, 4K video, 7 min, b&w, sound, German with English subtitles

I Packed My Bag

East German mesh shopping bags molded into ceramics and placed on styrofoam buoys form fossil-like sculptures exploring memory, consumption, and material afterlives of everyday objects.

2023 - 2025, ceramic, knit bag, styrofoam, plaster, gesso, various sizes

Glass objects, formed from an old wooden floor from Amsterdam-North, preserve fossil-like traces of dwelling and offer a micro-perspective on changing foundations.

2023, glass, dimensions variable, styrofoam light box

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

Mobile photos of urban asphalt from cities where I've lived and worked, machine-knitted into fabrics. Exhibited as folded 'walks' performed by flâneurs or draped on tables/floors, this fluid index oscillates between fashion cloth, archive, and map.

2019 (ongoing), machine knitted fabrics, mixed material

Regardless of Nationality

A series of AI-generated images from prompts of the Diver of Paestum and a migrant artist rights report. Silver leaf overlays evoke ceramic repair traditions, suggesting mending cracks in nationality and belonging.

2023, laser print, silver leaf, silver leaf, 32 x 40 cm, clip frame

Notes For Migrating Plant, Objects And Humans

An extension of After the Gift, this piece charts baskets’ full genealogy in a book with graphic notations—detailing size, plant/artist names, sources, etc., and countries of origin/residence. This genealogy of baskets can be played as sound on a "labephone", adapting the form of extensive museum labels.

2019, metal bars, letter decals, vibraphone mallets, various materials, artist book, b&w, 31,5 cm x 23,5 cm

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

Bamboo objects woven after Blossfeldt’s plant photography (Urformen der Kunst, 1928; Wundergarten der Natur, 1932) are displayed in a classical museum style. Hybrid baskets translate microscopic plant forms into Chinese weaving techniques. The vessels invite speculation on cultural and technical transfers across borders.

2016 - 2019, baskets (#11, woven bamboo, dimensions variable), artist book, 2 videos, performance

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

Ornaments of Property

Sculptural fragments from collected DVD/CD drives as "bricks." Discarded devices become fossil-like artifacts in modern ruins—panning imaginary architectures blending ancient ornamentation. The modular sculpture can be rebuilt from provided examples, combined into site-responsive installation groups, or newly configured.

2015/2018, CD/DVD computer drives, various dimensions

- From Le Musée Imaginaire' series -Cloth hangers from the artist's private collection meet pages from André Malraux's Le Musée Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale (1952). Domestic objects attach to b&w photographs—mimicking sculpture gestures, matching forms, extending bodily over edges, or prosthetically repairing damage.

2015, paravent, 405 m x 175 cm, slide projection, 81 35 mm slides

Crippled Symmetry

Emptied 16 mm film archive boxes from the Goethe Institute Amsterdam attic form ornamental arrangements. Inverse spaces of absent reels index cultural memory—misaligned ("crippled") with floor patterns, tiles, wallpaper, stucco, and windows of the 19th-century building. Framed as migrated motifs, they blur national heritage into complex decorative histories.

2013, 81 35 mm slides, color

Every artist who worked at the Rijksakademie since 1993, mapped by name, year, and studio on the building's floor plan. This archival grid reveals institutional architecture while inviting speculation on ambitions, selection processes, and collective oblivion. Acquired by the Rijksakademie for continuous updates.

2012-ongoing, print on paper, mounted photograph, b&w

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

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

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

Hot summer days overcrowd Tokyo's amusement park pools, ruled by loudspeaker commands and hourly 10-minute evacuations for lifeguard safety checks—scanning empty blue pools

2004, video installation, loop, color, sound

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 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

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