Niko Chodor, “Supplanting” (Poster: Sarah Szczesny)

Kapute Szene VI – 07.05.2026/ 16-21 Uhr
Kapute Szene presents the exhibition by Niko Chodor
supplanting

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Identity documents are strange and estranging things. A REAL ID or Personalausweis, bearing an image and text, printed and formatted according to obscure but (we assume) official standards, assigns its bearer an identity, a status, and a place that may or may not have anything to do with the bearer’s own heimat. The identity document identifies its bearer, assigns him an identity. Supplants it, even.

This abstraction of legal status from self—like that of borders from landscape —has an aesthetics, too. The color photograph, the seal, the text, the holographics. And behind the text, ornamental but also apparently functional, counter-counterfeiting—the intricate, overlapping guilloche lines. Chodor, who in his movements between nations and continents has been identified via passports, visas, and work permits, has witnessed the variations of these patterns across space and time. The meshwork shifts with each new issuance, each new designation of self.

In his new body of work, Chodor disentangles the layers of these patterns and disarticulates them from their source documents. He isolates the elements of the patterns, draws them out (literally, by hand), scales them up, and places them next to each other. It’s a process that seems an inversion of an ID’s function: here, the person extracts and recontextualizes aspects of the document, not the other way around. A “D” shape, reiterated into a dense network, seems to vacillate between a recognizable letter and a set of arcs and dashes. A generic pattern seems to undermine the insistent drone of BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND, as if the name of the nation were itself as placeless and universal as the parabolas and waves beside it. In fact, most patterns on ID documents across the globe are produced by a single company in the Netherlands; the marker of nationality is an import. We’re reminded: the pure nation-state is a fiction.

Ashlyn Ashbaugh

Kapute Szene
public space for art, music, film, literature, debate and discussion
Kyffhäuserstr. 31, 50674 Köln (Backyard)  

Friendly supported by
Kaput – Magazin für Insolvent & Pop / Gaffel Kölsch