Josephine Meckseper

15TH FEBRUARY - 4TH MAY 2008


GAK GESELLSCHAFT FÜR
AKTUELLE KUNST E.V. BREMEN
Teerhof 21
D-28199 Bremen
Phone +49 421 500897
office@gak-bremen.de

"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.

Curator: Mona Schieren

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 hours:
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