Questioning the long established

“Under the BQE” took place on 28 September, 2013 in New York, “from 5pm to dark” as it read in the invitation. The “guerilla gallery under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway” was closed again when it turned dark. Beneath the railway bridge between heavy iron pillars, in the trunk of parked cars, on the asphalt and in the midst of the usual collection of urban rubbish (plastic bags, glass shards, cigarette butts) works by Henke and Karlberg and their contemporaries and friends were shown including Nicolas Ceccaldi, Marlie Mul and Nora Schultz. “Under the BQE” is the slightly exaggerated somewhat cynically formulated answer to the contradictory demand that art should be political, authentic, young, dirty, as long as it conforms to the market and sells well. “Art looks good when it comes from dirty places”.

Art with a difference

Cool stone floor, old windows with green fly screens, heavy wooden furniture. For the exhibition “Please Respond”, which could be seen for three days during the Venice Biennale 2015, Italian curator Marta Fontolan made available a private apartment, which once belonged to her grandmother. In the courtyard of the block of houses “Lady Unique on the train from Venice”, one of Anna Uddenberg’s figurative sculptures could be seen bending in a contorted position over a suitcase. The breasts of the female torso are only barely covered by a bright orange-colored waistcoat; the typical backpacker rucksack looks about to slip from her shoulders. “PARASITES”, a T-shirt edition by Marie Karlberg and Stewart Uoo is attached to a cable by a peg as if hanging in the Venetian sun to dry. Adriana Lara drapes a banana skin on the light steps that lead from the courtyard to the apartment. Some of the works in “Please Respond” seem to fit quite naturally in the everyday scenario of the residential area, others deliberately stand out of the contextual frame, come over as happily out of place.

The intertwining of artistic and curatorial practice is nothing new. As long ago as 1855 French artist Gustave Courbet opened the “Pavillon du Réalisme” in Paris as an alternative exhibition space to the world exhibition taking place simultaneously. As a protest against an increasingly commercial-ized art world, in the 1960s artist initiatives realized exhibitions in warehouses or empty buildings. In Germany, there are likewise numerous non-commercial exhibition spaces run by artists, but only in recent years did the debate about “artist-curators” gain public relevance through numerous pub-lications and symposiums. Exemplary for the contemporary artist-curator hybrid is the four-strong New York collective DIS, who curated the last Berlin Biennale. In other words, when artists like Marie Karlberg and Lena Henke conceive exhibitions and in doing so create contexts for their own works this is not done so much as a strong protest against the art market or museums. Rather, if the roles of artist and curator coincide this can be seen more as a self-reflective practice through which the (economic) structures and (socio-cultural) conditions under which art is realized, seen and sold can be considered, revealed and challenged.