What We Bought

Everyday scrap, mass-produced goods, fetishes of our consumer culture: The exhibition “What We Bought” (the title refers to the artist book by Robert Adams) shows in photographs, films and installations the excesses of consumer and throw-away society – albeit not as a criticism of capitalism, but rather with an affirmative fascination with the never-ending flow of commodities, mass and surface, staged with a disconcerting hyperpresence of the real.

Calculated moments of unreasonableness; material-emphasising and often sweeping and extravagant, but precisely staged. The ostensible lack of distance results from a very close observation of the respective environment and the respective consumer culture. By refusing to be productive, the artists accumulate pure surface, thus appropriating aesthetic phenomena that have become part of our everyday Western cultural and consumer life.

Kuratorin / Kurator: Christine Frisinghelli
Kuratorin / Kurator: Maren Lübbke-Tidow
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: John M. Armleder
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Olaf Breuning
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Swetlana Heger
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Pjotr Uklanski
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Manfred Willmann