GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst
The artist presents the print series "Quelle International". Her insertions into the ideological frameworks of the politics of commodity become more than the mere commentary of political speech, and witty, harmless gestures of designed radicality. She engineers her critical methodologies, first by recalling the Brechtian usage of the form of defamiliarization.Curated by Mona Schieren.
curated by Mona Schieren
"Josephine Meckseper’s insertions into the ideological frameworks of the politics of
commodity become more than the mere commentary of political speech, and witty,
harmless gestures of designed radicality. What is most obvious is that Meckseper
never attempts the conflations she engineers as a form of nostalgic return to a more
simpler time of artistic engagement in the political sphere. She engineers her
critical methodologies, first by recalling the Brechtian usage of the form of
defamiliarization. In doing so, she makes us aware that the task of the politics of
form towards which political art directs its forces of designification of the
ideological code lies not in historical return, but in the excavation of the
genealogy of artistic forms that have their roots in critical projects beginning
with the early 20th century avant-gardes to the ones of the sixties.
The logic of the display surface (be it shelf, window, or vitrine) is that it is
merely a container for a range of viral transmutations of use and exchange value of
the artistic object into the social function of signs as a generator of another kind
of political and cultural capital."(Okwui Enwezor)
Meckseper created the print series "Quelle International" specifically to be
displayed in the showcases outside the gallery of the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle
Kunst. Instead of the usual exhibition posters, the artist has mounted large-scale
reproductions from pages of the now almost legendary "Quelle" mail order catalogue
from the year 1976, on silver polyester film.
Special edition
The hand-signed artists' book "Quelle International" will be published on the
occasion of Josephine Meckseper’s exhibition at the GAK this spring with essays by
Sylvère Lotringer, Gabriele Mackert and Mona Schieren. For more information contact
the GAK.
Josephine Meckseper was born in Germany and received her MFA from the California
Institute of the Arts in 1992. In 2007 Meckseper had a survey exhibition at the
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, accompanied by a monograph published by Hatje Cantz. Her work
was featured in Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Resistance Is,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary
Art: Footnotes about Geopolitics, Markets and Amnesia. In 2006 she participated in
Media Burn at the Tate Modern, London; USA Today, New American Art from The Saatchi
Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville,
Fundación Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla, Seville and the
Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York. She lives and works in New York.
opening february 14, 2008
GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst
Teerhof 21 - Bremen
Opening hours:
Tuesdays – Sundays 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m., closed Mondays