(2024 - ongoing)
Since antiquity humanity has pursued beauty – once carved in marble, painted onto canvas, and today, reshaped through the global aesthetics industry. In Creation of Beauty, I explore this modern ideal in places like Istanbul’s hair transplant clinics, world’S biggest Beauty trade fair in Düsseldorf, and luxurious aesthetic congresses in Monaco and Paris, attended by professionals from all across the globe.
With a focus on staged realities and silent absurdities, I document fluorescent treatment rooms, anonymized bodies in transformation, and machines that promise perfection. Beauty is no longer a mystery – it’s a product: marketable, standardized, buyable.
But beauty ideals are never universal. In ancient China, corpulence symbolized prosperity. Today, faces and bodies are filtered through algorithms, shaped by influencers, and measured against globalized standards. Throughout history, beauty has always been political.
This becomes especially clear in Germany’s past. Under the Nazi regime, the idea of the Übermensch – the racially defined “superhuman” – also shaped ideals of physical appearance. Jewish individuals, like Margot Friedländer, underwent nose surgeries to avoid persecution. For some, altering their looks became a strategy of survival.
Nowadays plastic and cosmetic procedures aren’t only serving vanity or conformity. For many people, they offer relief from real psychological suffering. In a society where physical appearance can deeply affect social belonging, confidence, and self-worth, changing one's body can become a way to reclaim control. These interventions can in some cases reduce the inner pressure and stigma that individuals feel – especially when appearance becomes a source of exclusion, ridicule, or dysphoria.
Creation of Beauty is a reflection on how concepts of beauty are shaped by society, power, commerce, and identity – between ideal, illusion, trauma, and optimization.
