Research in practice, ongoing

Exhibition series / Micro artist residency / Bar, 10/07 – 11/05/2022

Artists in residency:
Thilda Craquelin & Zoé Ledoux, Cora Marin, Lowri Whiskerd

Sound artists:
Julia Koch, Alexandra Tretter, Eliza Wagener

Graphic design: Wiebke Grieshop
Bar design: together with Paula Hoffmann

DIENST was a temporary low-budget institution that I directed. It combined a studio visible through the shop window with a bar scenario in the back room. The involved exclusively female artists I invited for micro-residencies showed their commissioned works during the exhibition series “Schatz ich kann nicht, ich bin im Dienst” (“Honey I can’t, I’m on duty”). All participants received a basic income for their stay. On weekdays Monday to Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., the artists produced artworks. Exhibition openings were held every Friday night. The bar scenario in the back room, the symbolic place of precarious part-time jobs was directly integrated into the space of artistic production and at the same time established as a meeting place.

From here, I have been developing a research in practice project that is now called Galerie Arbeit. My friend and curator Marie Kuhn joined me in 2023. I aim to gather information around class related inequality in the arts, perspectives and concepts for income stability for artists, and experiment with formats that function as real examples for new, market and exploitation critical, safer ways of artistic labor. As artists, especially those from non-academic and low-income backgrounds, we operate in a hyper-competitive, elitist realm, as we gamble our way up and down the paternoster. What is this industry that produces extremely well educated professionals but keeps them in a constant state of existential fear? How can we be non-stop on duty with our backs pressed against the employment agency?