"You have made a work of art and give it to me; you give it to me without a fixed price. We're not dealing with that. After a certain time I decide to give you something back and give you something. This now is the spirit of the gift: We mix lives into each other and so we and things leave our respective spheres. Basically, it's a single round because you owe yourself and your possessions to others."
(based on Marcel Mauss)
artists*:
Jessica Arseneau, Jaeyong Choi, Friedrich Günther, Marlet Heckhoff, Christian Holze, Taemen Jung, Alexander Klaubert, Leonard Korbus, Lisa Kottkamp, Slavica Radic Lemac, Jakob Limmer, Jihee Moon, Toni Mosebach, Kiki Posch, Carsten Saeger, Andrea Garcia Vasquez, Yana Zschiedrich
A project of the class for installation and space (Prof. Joachim Blank) in collaboration with Klara Meinhardt
Opening of the HGB tour, Thursday, 15.2.2018 from 6 pm
Opening hours: Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the HGB tour
In the winter semester, students of the class dealt with appropriation art and cultural appropriation. In dealing with different strategies of appropriation, the Potlatch concept inspired the project The Present Agreement for the HGB tour.
Potlatches - practiced by the First Nations in the coastal regions of Northwestern America until the middle of the 19th century - became known as ritualized "festivals of giving".
From the cycle of giving, giving, accepting and reciprocating, a social system of value circulation develops by revealing social interactions and hierarchies of the participants. In the 1920s the French sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss published a theory of gifting under the analysis of the potlatch. The term "gift economy" was recently updated by the idea of sharing on the Internet, whereby values such as attention and private data became a currency.
This inspired us to discuss concepts of communication, social interaction and connections between artists, artworks and collectors as an exchange of values.
Over the years, the HGB Rundgang has developed an annual ritual and a specific format of art presentation - not only are works of art shown, discussed and sold, but an interested audience also shows that they want to participate in the production of values through contemporary art.
The Present Agreement, as a class collaboration project, takes up this need, offering their artworks as gifts to the audience of the tour. Every visitor could be the owner* of a real, authentic work of art - without superficial conditions.
Packed in crates and provided with "freight labels", the works are staged as an installation in the room and ready for delivery.
