Lustmord

The German term Lustmord implies desire or pleasure, alongside sexual gain, derived from a murderous act or its representation. The phrase traces back to early twentieth-century German psychiatrists and scholars responding to a wave of serial murders. It was intended as a technical, secular description, entirely stripped of connotations like "monsters" or "evil." Yet, when translated into English, "lust murder" reverted to ancient concepts of moral corruption and depraved sexuality.

This site-specific installation took place in Weimar, Germany, and was inspired by Weimar Republic-era paintings such as Otto Dix's Der Lustmörder (Selbstporträt). I constructed a cross-section of two rooms inside a larger space, utilizing a tilted perspective, angular lines, and deliberate clutter to accentuate the organized chaos of the environment. The most critical witness to this crime is the viewer, whose voyeuristic relationship to the space is mediated through an inward-facing peephole. Left without a body, the audience is challenged to puzzle out its missing location and reconstruct what exactly occurred.

The installation unfolds in a domesticated yet unsettling setting. While the floor evokes a sense of age, the room itself, though completely black, features subtle signs of an interior urban space. Several electrical outlets hint at a lived-in environment; this is not a void or a non-place, but a tangible urban setting shrouded in black, transformed as if lifted from a dream. Instead of a window, a full-body mirror suggests a space beyond the picture plane, the very space we, the viewers, inhabit. Placed squarely in the center of the room, the mirror emphasizes our perspective, underscoring the viewer's complicity as an active witness to the Lustmord.