INTERVIEW Lena Schnurrbusch
PUBLISHED 5 AUG 26
Working across painting, video, print, and installation, Mael Glass develops projects that are shaped by the specific questions each work raises rather than by a fixed medium. Many of these projects are driven by questions in which familiar structures begin to shift and reveal underlying tensions.
// How would you describe your artistic practice?
I’m interested in moments when something becomes visible that wasn’t meant to be: a behaviour, a tension, a contradiction, or a structure beginning to fail. Often, there is a question of control involved – who has it, who doesn’t, and what happens when it starts to slip. I’m drawn to situations that feel slightly uncomfortable or unresolved. In video, this can emerge through observation, editing, or the position of the camera. In painting or installation, it might be a distortion, a repetition, or a familiar form behaving differently from what we expect. I’m interested in what happens when something that appears controlled begins to reveal something less controlled beneath the surface. I don’t necessarily want to resolve that tension. Sometimes the uncertainty surrounding it is what makes me want to keep looking.
// Which moment of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
The point where a piece stops fully obeying me. When a system I’ve built – a wave pattern or a camera move – starts producing something I didn’t plan, and I have to decide whether to correct or follow it.
// What materials, tools or techniques do you usually work with, and why?
I’m drawn to materials that become layered through their relationship with light and image – surfaces that resist being only one thing. Fabric can hold, filter or transform an image. A basin of water can reflect what appears above it while creating an image of its own. Its mirrored surface creates a sense of depth despite being physically shallow, while the reflected light reaches beyond the basin and into the surrounding space.
// What is your contribution to SEE DJERBA 2026, and how is it connected to this year’s theme, Akros / Entanglement?
“it may carry what was lost” is a two-part video installation, shown across two separate projections with a shared soundscape. One projection, cast onto loosely hanging fabric, shows a surface deforming in recurring, never-identical waves, seen from above, from a perspective that never quite settles. The second projection, cast onto a long wall, works with water itself from the same perspective. Both ask the same question, just in different ways: what and who gets lost in it? That question isn’t abstract here. The installation sits in the Borj el Kebir, looking out over the Mediterranean: a sea that has carried people, goods and histories back and forth for millennia, and that keeps what it takes. Political and economic forces drive people across seas. Around these crossings, laws, borders, institutions and media create a machinery of control and forgetting. They determine who may pass, whose passage is seen, and whose story slips from view as it unfolds or public attention moves elsewhere. It also raises the question of what we choose to pay attention to and what we don’t. The wave pattern on the fabric picks up that same current in a different way. Not water, but the same movement, held on cloth instead of stone.
// What does entanglement mean to you?
Not two things touching, but two things that can no longer be fully separated. Where pulling one apart also changes the other. That’s entanglement to me: systems caught up with each other. None of them are innocent, and none of them can really be separated from the rest. It’s a useful word because it doesn’t let you locate the problem in just one place. You can’t blame the water alone, or the wave alone, or one system alone.
// What do you hope visitors experience when they encounter your work?
Honestly, I hope for a moment of uncertainty. Not immediately knowing whether you’re looking at a landscape, the sea or flesh, and feeling that uncertainty take hold. The pattern reads from both sides, and it bleeds onto the wall behind it. You can step through the fabric into the space behind it. Entering doesn’t disrupt the image, but instead folds you into it.
// Is there an artist, writer, or thinker who has influenced your practice?
Nona Garcia and Kawayan de Guia. I met them as a teenager, when I was living with them in Baguio City for a few months, spending time around their studios and daily practice. Watching them work taught me something I hadn’t really seen anywhere else: how to build a vision into a finished piece almost entirely on your own terms, without needing anyone else’s permission. Another key influence is Julika Rudelius, who has been my professor for more than six years. Over that time, her influence has been less about a single idea and more about a way of working. She pushed me to get concrete, to edit down to what actually matters, and not let the social questions in a piece get lost in the process.