For the exhibition ARTandPRESS, the ZKM invited me to contribute to their blog series. I wrote on the techniques of “Aufklärung” (with the German double meaning of “enlightenment” and clearing up/solving sth.) and what this might have to do with Superheroes working for the press. “Aufklärung hinter Masken” in the ZKM blog.
I wrote a text on the topics of “Commitment and Enthusiasm” for the lexical part of the first volume of the book series “Kunst Pädagogik Partizipation”, mostly regarding the question how these notions can (or should) become a basis for artistic practice. More on the book on the publisher’s website. (German)
Deuxpiece, an art space in Basel, invited us to do a project, and we arrived on the 2nd of June with a “five in a row” programme ready – a format we had already tried out in Karlsruhe three times before. For Basel, we brought a mix of very different genres and exhibition types, from performance to classical white cube. The evening started with a joint exhibition by Rodrigo Hernandez and Maika Hassanbeik – two takes on formal reduction. Then, Alexander Basile arrived, via bike from Cologne (or not), and presented the audience with a presentation of his trip (or not) – “photography is at best a well-meant illusion”. Third in the row was Brad Alexander with an exhibition including several sound objects and himself, sitting at a table and painting – or writing – slides for a projector in front of him. A quite exemplary white cube show followed with a sculpture and a drawing by Henry Staschik, and the show finally ended by turning the space into a black box (and into white again) for Matt Calderwood’s video “Strips (vertical)”.
Our art space has still no home in May, but designers Special Machine have just recently initiated their co-working/social space The Commodore Room in Karlsruhe. They not only have a great lounge and bar, but also hadn’t yet moved in their gear, so we “gallerified” their workspace for an exhibition of Frederik Busch‘s project BUSINESSPLANTS. Frederik made a series of portraits of plants as we find – or rather ignore – them in offices; a neglect that both tells us much about our attitude towards our fellow creature, and can be read as a metaphor for life (and suffering) in the office – a de-objectification of the business plant.
The Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe in Ettlingen has initiated a small series of exhibitions with Karlsruhe art students under the title “Höhenluft”. For the show in March, “Wer einsam kam” with Rodrigo Hernandez, Una Kim, Lukas Schneeweiss, David Semper and Maria Tackmann, I was invited to do an introduction during the opening. I chose the German word “Entfernung” – with its double meaning as “distance” and “reduction” – as a metaphor for artistic processes and the strategies employed by the artists in the show. There is a PDF of my text on Rodrigo’s website.
The “Fresswagen” was an project by three art students from the HfG Karlsruhe – an installation that was just as much a performance site as a food cart, and which showed up during many art events at the university or the ZKM. For the final installation of the Fresswagen, the artists produced a book that documented the previous stations of the cart, which was subsequently dismantled, and its fragments sold to the audience. They asked me for a text for the book, and I wrote a short imaginary history of the food cart’s medieval roots, and its impact on today’s contemporary art scene.
“Image Match” is a publication following a conference of the same name, which took place at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2010. I presented a paper on eclecticism as a strategy in Manga & Anime. My point was that mixing and fragmenting the history and the iconic reservoir of “Others” (in our case, European history in fictional stories like D.Gray-man or Berserk) is on the one hand a maybe involuntarily subversive strategy against essentialist concepts of culture (cp. Anthropophagia), and on the other hand a sign of today’s crisis of representation, which makes essentialist and unequivocal images somehow less “realistic” than the ambiguous and fictionalized.
For the HfG Karlsruhe’s magazine Munitionsfabrik, I wrote an essay on how critical art becomes appropriated by the bourgeoisie as a feel-good strategy that relieves people from actually having to care and to transform society. This Munitionsfabrik issue was on “failure”, and while I think that art in general simply cannot fail if you see it as an experiment – even bad art makes sense, as an experiment’s unexpected outcome – its system can fail as soon as the experimental quality is abandoned, and art becomes an instrument for keeping the “creative classes” occupied (and quiet). You can get the Munitionsfabrik #21 through the HfG’s website (German). Worth buying for some of the other articles, too.
After two years of preparation the exhibition The Global Contemporary opened at ZKM Karlsruhe, with more than 100 artistic positions and a lengthy artist-in-residence programme. TGC is not meant to provide a survey of contemporary art as a Biennale would do, and even less an “inventory” of today’s artistic production, sorted along regional or any other guidelines; it is a discursive show on the multi-level interplay of the arts scene with current economy and society. Interplay meaning that artistic production within an environment determined by the processes of Globalisation will inevitably also be influenced by these processes, may they be the dissolution of regional borders or intensifying economic circumstances; interplay meaning, also, that artists take up these topic as the content and cause of their practice. As a co-curator, I am responsible for quite a few of the things to be found in the exhibition space, and the accompanying brochure.
The research project “Global Art and the Museum” has been running since 2006; I joined in 2009, and the first project I was (then still marginally) involved in was the “Contemporary Art and the Global Age” seminar and conference. In 2010, I co-organized “Global Studies“, a conference for PhD students working on art in the global context. More than twenty Essays from those who we had invited for the two events eventually became the book titled Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture; the third volume in a series of the research project’s publications. Edited, and with an introduction by me.
