MASCHINENHAUS M1

Up And Down
Today’s Avant-Garde as Tomorrow’s Salon Art?
Lena Braun, Jennifer Danos, Grace Jones / Nick Hooker, Christine Sun Kim, Akane Kimbara, Wolfgang Müller, Magnús Pálsson, Andy Warhol / Susan Sontag, Ming Wong / The Island of Lost Souls
2 April – 6 August 2017

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Wolfgang Müller: Die Hyperinterpretation des Großen Glas von Marcel Duchamp durch Bruno Hoffmann im Westberliner Frontkino 1984, 2017, Courtesy Sound Archive Walther von Goethe Foundation; © Wolfgang Müller / VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn, 2017; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Ming Wong / The Island of Lost Souls: Lehre Deutsch mit Petra von Kant, 2017; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Magnús Pálsson: Maths (Stærðfræði), 1976/1978, Courtesy of the Artist; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Lena Braun, California Roll Inside Out, 2017; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Jennifer Danos: On the Ideology of Practice & Repetition 4, 2017 und Grace Jones in Corporate Cannibal, 2008, Regie: Nick Hooker, © Courtesy Nick Hooker; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Akane Kimbara: Paper Boats, 2017, Courtesy of the Artist; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Up And Down, Exhibition view KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2 April – 6 August 2017) // Christine Sun Kim: The Sound of Anticipation, The Sound of Inactivity, The Sound of Being Resigned, The Sound of Laziness, The Sound of Being Spaced Out, The Sound of Apathy, 2016, Courtesy the Artist and Caroll / Fletcher, London; Photo: Jens Ziehe

Art likes to present itself as counterculture. This makes popularity in art often seem suspicious: in a way, art should be anti-mainstream, avant-garde. “Yet today’s avant-garde often ends up as the salon art of the future,” says the artist Wolfgang Müller. Many things are overestimated, while other things are overlooked or ignored. That which does not receive widespread attention and recognition is designated as subculture or underground.
Up And Down presents artists who work between the blurred boundaries of subculture, high culture, and mainstream. They question the mechanisms on which these attributions are based and explore how they are negotiated. When is something considered high culture? And when is it considered subculture? Is subculture more authentic than kitsch, glamor, and pop? Where does the “packaging” convey its messages? The exhibition will show artworks that set such categorisations in motion or reformulate them in simultaneities and asynchronicities.

Curated by An Paenhuysen (Guest curator)
With the kind support of Design Your Wall, www.designyourwall.com.

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