Skeleton-Man – A Light in the Dark

Skeleton-Man is a multidisciplinary art project that wants to motivate personal confrontation with death. This ambition is conveyed on multiple levels and through various channels.

Partly, Skeleton-Man consists of a physical figure who, as DJ, dancer, and guest speaker, seeks to motivate action and contemplation of life’s greatest questions through engaging entertainment and guest talks. Partly, the Skeleton-Man universe includes a visual arts component that freezes the Skeleton-Man concept in time and space in the form of stylized objects, where light – both visual and symbolic – aims to activate a quiet but insistent confrontation with the culture of repression.

Utilizing different tools the Skeleton-Man art project seeks to create a combination of mental impressions and physical activation that both subtly and forcefully aims to motivate a theoretical and practical, existential reflection on human fragility, transience, and freedom. In this manner, the artist behind Skeleton-Man – who personally carries out the entire process from design, production and staging – works at the intersection of performative body art, visual art, and existential reflection.

With Skeleton-Man, I want to make an art that does not wish to reconcile with death but insists on its presence – without sentimentality and without judgment, but with a clarity that hammers through. Image, movement, and awareness, under the Skeleton-Man moniker is always an invitation to look death in the eye – and shine a light on it.

Using phosphorescent transfer paper, cut out as human bones – hands, skull, torso, etc. – artworks are created based on modern technology that both light up and call for active engagement and action as well as quiet reflections and contemplation in solitude and darkness. With white bone prints set against a black background, a visual duality is evoked: light and darkness, day and night, life and death. In this graphic black-and-white contrast the thin, glowing El Wire, becomes an image of the human condition where life and death presuppose each other – and where death is not just a distant idea but a bodily reality we carry with us, and where light, for a moment, is all we have.

Through live performances and costume work, the figure is brought to life as a dancing and entertaining memento mori with light strips edging the limbs like electric nerves. The artist plays here with the boundaries of the skeleton metaphor: not as the final image of death but as a glowing witness to life’s temporality. And with the skeleton paintings, the audience has the opportunity to take their own skeleton home and in a safe environment be reminded of life’s finitude in an aesthetically captivating way.

For more information, pricing, and shipping details, please contact info@skeleton-man.com