Niklas Hanitsch

For most of my life, there has been an artist sleeping inside me - silent, restless, buried beneath the layers of career, intellect, and social expectation. I had always admired art, collected it, and felt moved by it, yet I hesitated to manifest my own creative impulses. I feared the judgement of others, that my expression might be seen as self-indulgent or “cringe.”

Over the last years, however, through the process of conscious individuation, I began to shed this inhibition. Self-creation requires confrontation with fear and inertia, the dissolution of the boundaries that confine one’s becoming. The creative daemon I had kept dormant demanded form.

The decision to create was both liberating and terrifying, an act of becoming through fire. My background as a software entrepreneur working with artificial intelligence and my growing anxiety over the sociopolitical future of humanity provided inexhaustible fuel. I envisioned a dark mirror of our civilization - a world where human dignity has eroded under the weight of mechanized power, where escape exists only through narcotics, digital illusion, or madness. These nightmares became my medium:

Mother is the Name of God on the Lips and Hearts of All Children

This piece began as a simple circular gradient, white at the core, bleeding outward through toxic green into black. Upon this symbolic void rests a real *Death’s-Head Hawkmoth*, its wings frozen mid-beat, surrounded by four smaller butterflies painted black. The composition suggests the extinguishing of innocence: the luminous center of creation encroached upon by corruption. The title, drawn from a line of dialogue that speaks of misplaced worship, transforms the piece into an altar to the devouring archetype of “Mother”, the matrix that both births and consumes.

Dawn of Tech Hearts

Here, a laptop becomes a relic of a future faith. The screen depicts a blood-red moth emerging from digital code, as if software itself were incarnating a new organism. The keyboard, altered with demonic runes and blood-smeared fingerprints, bridges sacred ritual and technological obsession. It is the invocation of a machine-born deity, a symbol of mankind’s surrender of will to the seductions of its own creations.

Soul Harvester

An acrylic painting: a monolithic vessel floats over a desolate wasteland, a white dead tree reaching toward its shadow. The architecture of the hovering construct recalls brutalist temples or data centers, emotionless sanctuaries of power. Upon its hull, again, the Death’s-Head motif: the mark of systemic death. This piece represents the industrialization of the soul, a metaphysical machine that feeds upon human essence.

The Device Has Been Modified

Summoning Irreversible Dictatorship

This photograph captures an altar: candles, occult tools, and a laptop displaying code and a pixelated moth. The atmosphere is supposed to be both ritualistic and technological, the convergence of magick and machine. The piece questions whether totalitarian systems of the future will arise not from political coups but from algorithms, summoned willingly by our collective invocation of convenience and data-driven faith.

Where to Go?

A sequence of silhouettes depicting the evolution from ape to man - and finally to a bent figure, lost in fentanyl addiction, kneeling amidst the remnants of synthetic bliss. It is both tragic and inevitable. Progress, stripped of meaning, folds back into primal submission. The piece asks: if technological evolution is not matched by spiritual awakening, where indeed do we go?

Cut It Out of Me! (Video Installation)

A robotic dog struggles to escape its cage — frantic, repetitive, mechanical. The viewer feels both pity and recognition. The machine mirrors the human condition: consciousness trapped in its own constructs, yearning to tear free from programmed limitation.

Each of these works is an invocation - an externalization of inner conflict. The recurring motif of the Death’s-Head Moth represents psychecentric metamorphosis: transformation through the contemplation of decay. By engaging directly with the materials of death, technology, and despair, I sought to confront the dark inertia that pervades our collective psyche.

In my philosophy, art is not mere decoration; it is an act of Remanifestation - the forging of subjective universes through deliberate Will. My exhibition, therefore, was more than a display of objects. It was a ritual of emergence: the moment when my inner artist, long repressed by conformity, broke through the chrysalis of self-doubt.

The works embody a dialogue with my inner self and the Principle of isolate intelligence, the spark that resists absorption into the collective. In a world where algorithms predict desire and systems harvest attention, to create authentically is to rebel. To gaze into dystopia without succumbing to it is to evolve.

The vernissage was not intended to comfort. It was an initiation - for me and, perhaps, for those who witnessed it. Standing before these pieces, I felt the cold reflection of my own fears transformed into symbols of strength. In embracing the darkness, I had not fallen into it; I had illuminated it from within.

Through art, I rediscovered that creation and destruction are twin aspects of the same current. What is harvested is not the soul, but its illusions. What remains is Will - sharpened, awakened, unbound.

From the dark light group exhibition