The Bavarian Ministry of Homeland has been located in this very building since its foundation in 2014, parallel to the start of the IS crisis and the resulting refugee movements towards europe. A political institution, that is both a symbolic gesture with enormous radiance and, with its guileless assertion of innocence, stands in the eye of the storm of a multitude of currently highly virulent discourses.
Nevertheless, "Feet up!" is neither an invasion nor a Trojan horse. We do not believe in the bourgeois narrative of healing culture, a purification of horror through radiant works of art. We cannot understand the project as a dichotomous antagonist to the site of its exhibition, but rather as proof of our own inescapable involvement in identity-forming cultural economies. Even if we wanted to, we cannot position ourselves as "the good guys" against "the bad guys".
Against this background, we reflect in the exhibition on the conditions and ultimate determinacy of artistic action. The function of correcting and repairing ascribed to us as artists, the associated conditions of financing and organisation, and in particular the deepest interweaving and co-responsibility of our actions in culturally determined discrimination.Not in the Museum or the Academy, but in the actual centre of the discourse, we seek to deny the proclaimed absence of political neutrality, to present the idea of the "white cube", the neutral space in which culture is able to float independently, broken by the quasi-performative act of exhibiting there under harsh political conditions.
“Feet up!”, 2023
