DIE EIGENHEIT DER DINGE
Cornelis van Almsick Satellite, FJK3, Vienna (AT)

22.02.2014 – 09.03.2014

Curator:
Cornelis van Almsick (DE)

Artists:
Julius von Bismark (DE), Benjamin Hirte (DE), Birgit Megerle (DE), Valentin Ruhry (AT), Kay Walkowiak (AT), Marcin Zarzeka (PL) 



The engagement with 'thinghoods', with material culture in the broadest sense, is strikingly represented in contemporary art production and exhibition practice. While our daily life and also art functions more and more virtually, a theory of things offers a return to the real. Already the French writer George Perec (1936 - 1982) describes in his debut work 'The Course of Things' the exchange from human to consumer and the accompanying subjugation towards the objects of his desire. 

'The Peculiarity of Things' shows things or materials of everyday life that have been processed or manipulated. The most frugal objects and situations are brought into focus, suggesting a reading that is in itself very concrete and not at all metaphysical: it is the view of things of the everyday, to which one generally does not attach any significance. Similar to Gursky, who in his work "99 Cent" from 1999 declares the ordinary supermarket in its colorful diversity to be a cultural asset, the artists refer to the complexity implicit in the primitive industrial product, which is staged, adapted, reconstructed, or reduced to its components again and again.


Text: Shelly Goldstine, Vienna 2014
Photos: (c) Studio Kay Walkowiak