Studio Sven Sauer Deviation

Sven Sauer’s installations focus on a theme that increasingly challenges our times: hope—not as an idealized state, but as a real, verifiable trace. Hope is considered a remnant of a bygone era, an abstract symbol. We are too surrounded by noise, disillusionment, and cynicism, amid all the clamor and images that bombard us every day.

Sven Sauer searches for these hidden traces of hope in our reality. His works are the result of extensive research, data, statistics, and scientific studies collected over decades.
For hope, as his work suggests, is not a sentimental feeling, but a measurable phenomenon. It flickers in data series, in ecological forecasts, in social fractures, and in the quiet perseverance of people and systems.

Deviation spreads out across the room as a carpet of glass fragments, woven from shards collected from all over the world. In our society, broken glass symbolizes something ominous. Broken windows precede earthquakes. Shards are broken during riots when anger thunders against shop windows. And there is glass that is deliberately broken to stop people. Shards of glass on the tops of walls. Sharp-edged borders.

But are we really as dark as we perceive ourselves to be? Based on texts by historian Rutger Bergman, the installation reveals another truth: in times of great hopelessness, history shows cooperation prevails. From certain angles, the processed shards catch light and divide it a hundredfold, turning fragments of destruction into reflections of hope.