Noah Becker

In Ellbogengesellschaft (multicolor III), Noah Becker constructs a dense field of brightly coloured, pointed forms whose visual attraction is countered by their physical sharpness. The German term Ellbogengesellschaft – literally an ‘elbow society’ – describes a social order driven by competition, in which individuals advance by pushing others aside. Becker translates this condition into an almost bodily encounter: forms compete for space, pressing against one another without ever settling into harmony.

The work turns coexistence into a question of pressure. Sharing a society does not necessarily mean belonging equally within it. When space, recognition or opportunity are understood as scarce, securing one’s own position can come at the expense of another person’s ability to occupy theirs.

Within Negotiating Belonging, Becker’s work confronts the social structures through which belonging can become competitive rather than collective. Its crowded surface asks what kind of community emerges when making room for oneself requires displacing someone else. Belonging appears here not as a given condition of living together, but as something shaped by the way a society distributes space, visibility and opportunity among those within it.