—Tree House, 1996, Reinhardswald Kassel and Kasseler Kunstverein

A group of children and adults spent some weekends building a tree house in the forest. Later, it was carefully taken down and transported to the museum to be exhibited. Upon arrival, it turned out to be too big to fit through the museum doors. 

—ESUS

ESUS was realized in cooperation with the New York Public Art Fund. It engaged the—then ubiquitous—practice of Site-Specificity and posed the seemingly harmless question what Site-Unspecificity would look like. A work that would function equally well at any imaginable site, without functioning especially well in any specific context. The Sculpture consists of a floatation body, adaptable, telescopic legs and a solar-powered lighting system. Over the course of some years it has been shown in various countries and contexts. In most cases its indifference provoked the context to articulate itself. In Thompkins Square Park, a busy drug market, it was interpreted as a police surveillance measure and motivated the dealers to move their business elsewhere. In a skate park, it became a climbing toy and in the museum it was unmistakably abstract sculpture. 

—Statues, 2002

In the fall of 2002, news images of executives connected to ENRON being arrested became a common sight.

—FERCO - The Fertility Coop, 2010

For FERCO we built a small office suite into the gallery rooms. For the duration of three months, we received visitors for consultation meetings. After signing a contract which stated that all involved parties were aware of the illegality of their actions, visitors could either deposit or take home an anonymous sperm sample. Samples were kept in a medical freezer. FERCO was realized twice, at Galerie Vallois in Paris  and at Milliken Stockholm.

—Flip-Flop Factory, 2012

A basic sculpture workshop is installed in a gallery of the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai. Local art students have been hired for competitive wages to assist in the production. The objective is to cast as many flip-flops as possible. The two-part mold has been made after a clay model of a sandal. The final products look as much like real flip flops as the simple production method permitted. Being produced from casting silicone, they didn’t perform especially well as footwear. They were too heavy, too soft and not very durable. After a week, with our entire production of ca. 500 sandals piled up on the floor, we arranged a party. Visitors were allowed to pick a free pair of flip-flops and take them home. The sizes were mismatched and we had made many more left than right shoes. Still, by the end of the night, all had been taken. Flip-Flop Factory employed the technology of classical, studio-based art fabrication: from the hand-made original via an artisanal process to the final product in a fine-arts material. It did so in order to fabricate one of the most ubiquitous, cheaply produced objects in the world—if there is a truly international shoe it is probably the flip-flop—and make it more expensive and worse.

—PROW—the Prequel and Anti-PROW, 2010, two installations by Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen at Sara Meltzer Gallery and Art in General, NY

Proposing that much of contemporary art production has become a province of the entertainment industry, PROW structures itself like an independent movie studio; as a collective production effort that produces various types of spectacle. Mimicking the collective nature of cinematic production, PROW contests the art world’s standardized distinction between authorship and fabrication by crediting all of its contributors for their respective participation in the final production. The works in “The Prequel” address this communal structure and offer a regenerative perspective on our moment in history and in art production.
While the exhibition at times strikes a somewhat ominous chord, it nevertheless points to the hope offered through new virtual communities and modes of collectivity. Understanding these new forms as part and parcel of a globalized image-recycling culture, the series “Sequels” offers deadpan renditions of faux movie posters of sequels devoid of originals. Also included in the exhibition is a large stage fire, offers as much a symbol of the end of things as it does of a potential rebirth. "PROW—The Prequel" comes with proper cinematic end credits in the form of a video set to music by Eric (EROCK) Calderone.
A complimentary idealistic perspective is manifest in the drawings that line the walls. Derived from Google’s open source ‘3d Warehouse’ where anonymous contributors post rudimentary 3d models for anyone’s use, the drawings reflect, both, the fantasy of remaking the world in model form as well as the utopian dream of an open source wiki-culture. These drawings embed authorship in an endless stream of images and collective contribution: a virtual world of fragmentary and shifting authorial identity both administered and individuated through personal use.
Running concurrently with the “The Prequel” is an exhibition at Art in General. “Anti-PROW” was developed specifically for a nonprofit organization, to counter the presentation at Sara Meltzer Gallery.  “Anti-PROW” takes the manifesto as a point of departure, addressing fantasies of empowered authorship and rational control in the creative process.