has been for sale for some time, as you have seen. The maintenance and ongoing development to keep our non-profit and idealistic platform for contemporary art running and safe from hackers etc. costs money that is no longer there. Because of small investments that are necessary now and the running costs, we will have to shut down with a heavy heart at the beginning of summer on June 21.
In ancient China, kissing was considered to be on a par with coitus, and thus was confined to the bedroom. This led European explorers to conclude that the Chinese did not kiss at all.
In strict Muslim countries public kissing does not occur, and in some cases people have been arrested for kissing outside the home.
In Vietnam, spouses do not kiss outside the home, and not in front of the children. And parents rarely kiss children, except when they are small babies.
In some areas of Italy and other Mediterranean countries, friends greet each other by kissing on the mouth, men and women both. Arab men kiss each other on the cheek in greeting. In France, protocol demands a kiss on each cheek, while the Dutch throw in a third one for good luck.
In the animal world, the highly sexed Bonobo chimpanzees are known to kiss each other passionately. And orangutans in Borneo have learnt to kiss each other by observing humans.
We dream our lives in big gestures, but we live our lives in small moments. From we open our eyes in the morning to our last conscious thoughts at night, our lives are spent in tasks that absorb our attention and keeps us from considering the major issues that lies at the core of our lives: Why are we here? What is love? Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? What comes after death? These are questions that make us human and bind us together. The world has many ways to go and life lines, and it is not our job to judge these lines. According to Kierkegaard, man is a synthesis, a dialectical relationship between the conflicting sides, referred to both everyday life and eternity, stretched out between necessity and possibility. Every living human being must also under the same conditions relate to themselves - as deadly and eternal, as necessity and possibility. The lines in my painting are meant to draw the spectator into this dialectical relationship between the conflicting sides.
