Imagine a roll of sticky tape. Easy enough. It’s pretty ordinary stuff, right? But what about tape as a material for making art? Tape art? Now that’s pretty unorthodox. After all, a roll of tape is something anyone can get their hands on. Thus enter Tape That, a Berlin collective establishing this little known but burgeoning art.
Photography by Laurenz Bostedt
SLEEK: A key objective of yours is to establish tape art as an art form. What exactly are you doing to help make that happen?
Tape That: Wow, great question! Our main priority is to raise awareness of tape art. Since we were founded in 2011, a lot has happened, in Berlin especially. We’ve run workshops and exhibitions in over 30 countries, but tape art is more widespread in Germany than virtually anywhere else. Berlin is definitely the tape art capital, but we want to roll tape art out across the globe. The more people get to know it, try it and love it, the more accessible it will be. Tape as a medium feels so different from paint. The scope it offers is amazing. We’ve seen in our workshops how incredibly free people are during the creative process. As platforms, our workshops reflect our efforts to make tape art more widespread and accessible to more and more people.
Tell me a bit more about your background.
I originally worked in communication design, but was already taping by the time I started studying. Our collective is inspired by street art and graffiti, of course, and it started when one of the guys had a roll of tape lying around at home, picked it up and started to play around with it. He suddenly realised it offered so much more scope than spray paint. Every medium has its limitations and strengths, but with tape you can create incredibly long lines that you could never do with spray paint. And when you’re done, you can pull the whole thing off again. We started taping at friends’ parties and clubs, and that was how we managed to get enquiries from event organisers. Our first big job was for Audi. At some point we found ourselves in Japan and doing shows in Taiwan and the US. We’ve been to every continent, except Australia.
Photography by Laurenz Bostedt
And what about your first personal experience with tape?
I came across this New York artist who used neon-coloured tape. That really caught my imagination, and I went out to find some neon-coloured tape of my own. I was dying to try it out. There was a shop in Kreuzberg, in Berlin, called Klebeband, where you could buy it and where they really sold it to you as an art material rather than as something technical. That shop soon became the hub of the Berlin taping scene.
Image courtesy of Tape That
