calendario eventi  :: 

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16/2/2001

Copenhagen Brands

Sparwasser HQ, Berlin

Featuring the artist groups AVPD, rasmus knud, and Luxus.

Branding, advertising, marketing, presentation, service, slogan, logo design, corporate identity. These are words and concepts associated with the world of commercial business. They also apply, however, to the art works by the three Copenhagen artist collaborations AVPD, Luxus and rasmus knud presented at Sparwasser HQ. The project is the product, and the objects on display at the exhibition, as well as the individual artists, are subsumed into the projects operating under the labels AVPD, Luxus and rasmus knud. Thus, the esthetic object is the project, and it is the performance and the action, not the presentation, that is crucial.

AVPD uses marketing and economic strategies in their staging of events, for example in The Stockholm Project, which consisted in a helicopter flight over Stockholm at Artgenda 1998. In addition to the show at Sparwasser HQ, Rainonoff, an artificial rain shower, will be turned on at 4 p.m. and off at 5 p.m. in Bergstrasse during the first three days of the exhibition. In line with former projects, AVPD draws on common myths and symbols, e.g. rain, which is often exploited in popular culture and film as a strong metaphor and fascinating phenomena. By displaying the uncovered technical gear, AVPD reveals rain as a simple construction created by film rain equipment, hence deflating its otherwise poetic statement.

Luxus operates within the field of service and social capacity. At Luxus' internet site ( http://www.luxusevents.net ), subscribers to the Home Hospitality Project can enter their addresses, thus becoming partakers in a global network of people, who provide other members with places to stay overnight while travelling. The project Opgang , meaning staircase, was a fictional staircase in Copenhagen, where people could design and build their own living spaces themselves. Luxus constructs, although not always literally, a framework within which meetings and actions defined by the participants can take place. For example, the floor in one of the gallery rooms is covered with fresh grass, an invitation to play croquet: Luxury and leisure in the gallery.

The complete launching of The Soccergette Firm, the fan club of the fictitious female football team Seven Sisters, is the frame within which rasmus knud deals with individual and collective identity. The football world is imitated through pennants, slogans and a CD with marches, combined with the history of the turn of the century feminists, the suffragettes. Taking as their point of departure the popular football culture and its marginalized fraction of female football, rasmus knud describes the different human relations that make up a community. Since 1992, rasmus knud, a loosely structured and partly fictional group of artists, has dealt with such topics, and took part in Manifesta 2000, Ljublana as well as Monumentum, 2000, Nordic Festival of Art in Moss, Norway.

AVPD, Luxus and rasmus knud unveil already existing, but partly hidden social and mental formations of contemporary society. Thus, they make us reflect on manners and customs and recognize a range of possibilities in relation to other people and situations. Rather than being passive voyeurs or artists performing in the (hermetically sealed off) ivory tower of the art scene, AVPD, Luxus and rasmus knud intervene directly in the social structure under the premises laid out by that reality. The goal is not to protest against a hegemonic order, but rather to establish spaces of possible actions.

image: AVPD: Rainonoff artificial rain

opening hours: we-fr 4-7 pm, sa 2-6 pm

Sparwasser HQ, Torstrabe 161, Berlin

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