Baran Kok: Yeah, of course.

BK: A big one, for sure. I still remember when “So wie du bist” by MoTrip came out, that era really shaped me a lot. That was around 2015 or so. I remember my cousin showed it to me, and we would always argue about who’s better – Celo & Abdi or MoTrip – like, really dumb comparisons. They’re just super straight, you know? I basically grew up with that. But at some point, when I discovered female rap, mostly American female rap, not even German at first (I don’t think there was that much of it back then) that really took over. Especially Nicki Minaj, actually.

So I kind of followed it from a distance, but I was like, whatever. And then at some point, I was just like, no, fuck you.

BK: I always wanted to make music anyway, but it just wasn’t really possible you know with Kurdish family, immigrant family, and it was always like: you have to work, you have to become a doctor, a lawyer. My dad would always say, whenever he saw an artist: “Oh, that’s just an artist”. And I also had this image of artists like they live somewhere random, they’re dirty, they don’t shower, they don’t make money. That’s how I used to see it too, until I realized that you can actually make money from music. And I was always online, like since I was twelve. Always on social media. And that’s where I started seeing people post their stuff…

BK: Exactly, you see so much more that way. And I was like, oh my God, maybe it’s not that stupid after all.

BK: Yes, that’s right, my name is actually Baran Kok. I did think for a while that maybe I should come up with another name, but then I thought, if your last name is Kok, you have to use it. It would be stupid not to. Then I moved to Berlin and I thought, you just have to do it. If you don’t, someone else will. Get your act together, make connections, find some random studio. I had always written down a lot of ideas, but I never had any links to studios, producers, anything, and making music is insanely expensive. But then I asked the rapper Souly, and he said, “Yeah, of course, I’ll help you.” And that’s how we made Traurige Hure.

BK: Yes, for sure, and that’s really good. 

I only played compositions by men. It was only after I finished my studies that I thought about what we actually know about women’s achievements, whether in science or history. Of course, I was particularly interested in women in the music scene. I was shocked to realise that I didn’t know any female composers. After all, I make music on a professional level. So I started researching and opened the door to a whole new world.

Clara Schumann. I played one of her romances and then recorded it for my debut album. After that, I came across the American composer Amy Beach. Ultimately, I encountered so many female composers that it was really not easy to make a selection for my album Women. In addition to the music, I also studied the women’s biographies. I came across some incredible stories that I could relate to. I admire Mozart and Beethoven, but I find myself in the lives of female composers. That’s a real bonus. It’s important for girls and women to have role models.

Because she is an admirable woman. When she had to choose between her marriage and music, she chose her art. She followed her dream instead of focusing on money and security. Chiquinha Gonzaga also fought for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Her mother was a slave.

Absolutely. She campaigned for women’s rights, and her ‘March of the Women’ became the anthem of the suffragette movement, which Emmeline Pankhurst was also part of. Together with like-minded people, the activist demanded women’s suffrage in Great Britain. I sampled one of her speeches and interwove it with ‘March of the Women’. For me, this mixture has something very powerful about it because these women fought for a better future.

That can be frightening at times. However, I am a very positive person. I am confident that communication among women has improved significantly. We have become a community – even in the music world. For a long time, female musicians competed with each other. But now I have many wonderful colleagues. Instead of competing, we support each other.

With this song, I mainly want to appeal to my younger followers. Apart from that, ‘Flowers’ gave me strength during a break-up. I’m also interested in Miley Cyrus as a person. I find it impressive how she managed to gain control of her career after her time as a child star.

On the way to the gas chamber, they are said to have sung Ilse Weber’s song ‘Wiegala’, which I arranged for violin and a small string ensemble for my album. For very personal reasons: I have Jewish roots, some of my relatives were in Auschwitz. Since my great-grandfather did not survive the Holocaust, I talked to my grandparents about this dark part of history.

Yes. She was also a violinist, but she stopped playing after she got married. I always had the feeling that she regretted that. One day, she put her violin in my hands. Her passion for this instrument rubbed off on me. So now I am living the dream that she gave up.

YS: I became interested in figurative sculpture and started exploring different ways of making them. I think the first figurative work that I made was right after this show in London and in some way was the other side of that screen I discussed—in that it shows the person in front of it. The work was a self-portrait made of a down jacket that is
stuck in an empty desktop computer tower, the object people used to have in offices and homes below the desk before Laptops. The jacket is arranged or draped to look like there is an actual person in the jacket, so that the mental picture that is created is of someone actually living in the computer, or being stuck in a computer. Art doesn’t translate too well into language, so it sounds silly here. But as a sculpture I think it was formally quite interesting and successful. I later scanned this work and had it cast it in plaster, which totally changed the character of it. I showed the plaster cast on a little rabbit fur for my degree show in 2014.

YS: It was in that same period, exactly. I had moved from Berlin to London in 2012 for my Masters at the Royal College of Art, and the workshops there allowed me to try some new and more elaborate fabrication methods than I had used before. The first work I made there was a life-sized Emma Watson sculpture CNC-milled out of one solid block of Swiss pear wood. It took weeks to first program and then mill it, and I left it just like it came out of the machine. The only thing I added to the figure was this silver hedgehog necklace, because I had read online somewhere that it was her favorite animal. Since there was no other finishing or sanding, one can still see the way the robot was programed, the tracks it was running along and where it couldn’t quite get to etc. I find that quite beautiful.

YS: On a personal level, going back to what I said above, it came at at time when I was living in a long distance relationship, maybe feeling a bit lonely and spending a lot of time on my computer. On a societal scale I think the internet was still somehow new, especially social media, and there was this broader cultural shift towards life spent online, and the alienation that comes from it. It was also the time of the “dark web” with Silk Road and new online forums such as 4chan. There was a series of hacks targetingcelebrity phones which resulted in leaked private imagery— what you would call “nudes” today, and a lot of them
were fake. Living in London and being a Harry Potter fan, I was particularly interested in the attention that Emma Watson got online. I found it interesting to create a work that picked up on this contemporary moment, to reflect on this new character of the internet loner, but to address it within the traditional medium of figurative sculpture. I thought of Pinocchio and how one can now create a companion out of nothing by 3d printing or in my case milling it out wood. In an art historical sense it also aligned with this burgeoning movement in young art that came to be labeled as “Post-Internet” art, where people were interested in somehow bringing digital matter into physical space, or at least bridging the two worlds via objects in the real world beyond just phones and screens.

YS: Yes I presented a group of these sculptures with an Emma Watsons face but with fantasy bodies in my first major gallery show at Guido W. Baudach in Berlin 2014. The figures were in the nude with short hair, crossed legs and only their hands covering their breasts. The show got
some positive press coverage, which I think then came to the attention of a feminist Facebook group and some young London artists in specific. They took offense in the work and accused me of objectifying the female figure. I was called a misogynist, had magazines call me for comments and then fairs, exhibitions and sales canceled because of it. I would almost say that I was canceled before that was even a thing yet.

YS: I focused more on myself I think, and maybe lost a bit of my youthful energy at the same time. Shortly after my exhibition at Guido’s I moved to New York and did my first exhibition here at the Swiss Institute in 2015. The show was framed as a fictitious Honey Moon between a mermaid Emma Watson and me, and followed by an exhibition in Mexico in 2016 for which I created this stalker persona
obsessed with Kristen Stewart and Twilight. As a result of my move to New York maybe, and some other changes in my personal life, this fan fiction and celebrity part of my work slowly lost some of its relevance and interest to me. I tried to make work that was more personal and maybe more universal in subject matter at the same time. In 2017 I made an exhibition titled Single which had a picture of myself in the nude as an invite, and mainly consisted of ready-made sculptures of myself, sort of domesticobjects-assemblages. After that I did a show series called Primal in 2018 that presented very simplified, almost
pre-historic wooden figures. I combined these with a lifesized wooden Legolas sculpture, which I made after leaked nude images of Orlando Bloom appeared online. So the the celebrity aspect never fully went away, I just started to juxtapose it with other elements.

YS: Totally. In 2019 I did a show called Boys for which I made a plaster self-portrait of myself as a little boy based on a family video. In some way this was in response to the cultural climate of #metoo at the time, but it then also led me to the explore other elements of my past and the cultural archetypes that I grew up with. It led me to make the country boy plucking flowers next, and then the Snowman with the hearts as well as some of the new animal sculptures. Most recently I started combining all these figures into larger groups, which is something that keeps me busy and really excited today.

YS: The work you mention is titled Day and Night and I made the first iteration of it in 2021 for an exhibition in Mexico titled Eternity. In some way it is a reflection on masculinity which has been an interest of mine from the beginning and I guess heightened with the climate you describe. But I think this specific work comes without any feeling of guilt. I see it as an exploration of the relationship between softness and strength, much beyond the current moment I hope. What I see in the work is an oversized dandelion flower that props up a muscular Greek or Roman hero figure which is missing a leg. The flower is draped
around the torso so that it becomes the missing leg that the figure is precariously leaning on. I see the two elements as forming this fragile unit, but at the same time I could imagine them walking away together like this, him using the flower as a sort of crotch. I find it very poetic and nice how they together manage to defy the gravitational pull, which
is sort of the cleansing force of any standing sculpture.

YS: It differs. In the case of this work we just spoke about, the flower represents things like beauty or poetry or art in my mind, without wanting to load too much onto the work by saying this. I mean that it stands for what contrasts with the physical strength of the figure, but still supports it if that makes sense. In some other works the flower is personified I would say, even the next work where there are two flowers growing out of a concrete block. To me they become almost like figures, I see them as a couple that is flirting with each other in some way.
It’s this little moment of tenderness in a slightly hostile environment that I like about it. And then in some later works like in Laetitia, the flower to me represents a person outside of the arrangement. For this
figure the large flower is turned towards the woman and then child as if it was given to them.

YS: I’m glad to hear that. Damien Hirst speaks about having to make a fly piece after making a spot painting, just to balance the sort of good with the bad, the pretty with the ugly. I never had it like that. I like to make things that make you feel good, things that give you a deep and
hopefully warm feeling. In driving school you learn that if you look at the tree you will hit it, I think that is a good strategy for life also. If you want to be a happy person, think happy thoughts. The world moves by positive action not negative thought, so I really try to be engaged in the former 248

YS: I would need to think more about that. When it comes to the purpose of art, I often think about this quote by Gerhard Richter, who said that “art brushes the dust of the everyday”, which I find very beautiful and right. It can touch on the silly as well as the essential parts of the human experience, but in a way that is pure and complete. What I mean is that the world is always perfect within a work of art, not in a moral sense, but more in the way that a given moment can also be perfect. It’s like cleaning up your house, which gives you that one moment of enlightenment when things are all in place. Or that one first
breath of clean air when you step out in the morning, or looking at your kid when it sleeps or moves in a cute way. Art is exactly like this moment, but it never ends. It’s eternally perfect.

YS: I think it was Andy Warhol who said “Switzerland is great, it’s finished”. Which I think is a very interesting observation. My one friend always says about New York— it will be great once it’s finished. Which obviously it will never be. I’m not sure if this really captures anything at
all, but it’s easier to do things in New York. Someone once wrote about my work that “Nothing glamorous ever came from Switzerland,” which I think is an interesting observation. In Switzerland the ultimate achievement and thing another person could say about you, is that you are normal. It’s the absolute peak of Swiss-ness and the real ingredient if you want to belong—is not to stand out. As a young person I think this can feel limiting and disempowering. But the older I get the more I value the understatement and also the social cohesion in some way. There is a true sense of quality and people care about doing the
right thing and about doing things right. I appreciate that today.

YS: What I can see is that my work used to be much more loud and American while I was in Europe and much more Swiss since now that I’m in New York. Today I’m interested in making figures that are centered within themselves, not looking for attention or reliant on an audience or other people. The best I can hope for is to imbue them with a kind spirit, to put a little fire in their hearts. I read something the other day about monasteries, and how some of them are spectacularly modest. I really like that expression and idea, it’s something I strive towards. Maybe it’s my protestant upbringing but I do find true joy and beauty in restraint. I think the spirit lives in simple things. As Carl
Jung famously said, “if you are looking for god and haven‘t found him yet, you are not looking low enough.”

YS: In my mind the genuine opportunity of art is to speak about the things which don’t change over time. Art doesn’t get better with time, it’s not like technology where there is some kind of development and a strong notion of progress. I don’t think art gets better or worse. If I think about a person in a cave, they would carve a figure out of a piece
of rock or bone that might look quite similar to my onyx works. And in spirit and function it is probably pretty close to what I described with the Emma Watson work above—as in the first human carving themselves a friend or thinking about someone they saw in the forest. What I mean here is even though the Emma Watson work is extremely specific, and it took 2000 years of recorded cultural history to get to a place where all these references are in places, and where the technology exist to make it in such a realistic manner by a machine, to me it is no different than a piece of driftwood that barely resembles a figure at all. I’m interested in the whole spectrum of figuration, and think that especially the combination of these different forms, expressions and materials are thrilling to me. While there is a technological graveyard
for a lot of things that came in between, I would say that the earliest human artistic expression can still be as valid and meaningful as anything great made today. Art is like a perpetuum mobile that gives endless energy once it’s created, without ever losing any. Forever.