PIRVATE

On July 3rd of 2023 at 11:42 a.m., two pirates entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, interrupting the exam of Lena M. to steal the rector’s chair and declare the seized space to be a public commons!

The bold hijacking of the Sommerrundgang aimed to disrupt the usual course of events and its implicit power dynamics, allowing a shift for the institution to become something else: a heterotopia, a merchant ship, an impossible place, somewhere to practice criticism, to dream, resist and seek desires. Utilizing humor, playful subversion, and collaborative action, Lena explored themes of resistance and identity production within art institutions. Participants and visitors were thereby invited to reconsider their roles within the structured confines of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

The art academy itself was transformed into material: Nesting within it Lena’s Körperschaft— piracy became a location for subversion. By applying the disorganizing power of desire as a tool, she sought to escape the formalized, institutional production of her body as a student. Lena, recently distinguished as Meisterschüler, was the examinee of an institution, an institution that not only bears an idealistic imprint from the last century, but one that also reproduces the same societal exercise of power of those past times.

To tap into the disorganizing forces our desires have, the performances were developed using a principle inspired by psychoanalysis. Lena offered all the help, resources and knowledge she could give to help the performers achieve what ever they wanted to get out of the collaborative experience. Consequently, the boundaries of access, author and ownership were blurred, even extending to the creation of a savings club, which used her Meisterschüler degree as asset insurance. This act was a commentary on a recent expenditure scandal at the art academy and on the monetization of degrees with their respective status symbols.

The charged pirate fantasy was employed to push the medium of performance into reality and make the actions of Lena’s performers impactful and symbolically potent, which is an idea explored in one of the paintings, “The Magician”, showing a mage who shapes the world around her with magical agency. The painting also references the story of Bliss Symbolics, which enabled people with speech impediments to communicate for the first time. Bliss Symbolics was a pasigraphy advanced by its native speakers to the disapproval of its purist inventor Charles K. Bliss, who tried to imprint his sovereignty of interpretation on the developing language, hence its similarity to the institutional production of bodies as “students”.

The second painting, “Siehst mich in der Space Bar wie ich mich leer taste - Disorganization Dollz”, depicts the antithesis that a dismembered, administered body cannot overcome the neo-Biedermeier, even when rebelling, and with it one’s inner conservatism. Nonetheless, torn between wanting the Meisterschüler “guilt” coin and wanting to share an escape plan from the imprint of desire as the desire of an Other (Lacan), Lena summed up the situation in her own humorous words: “Ich kann hier nicht arbeiten, wenn ich mich nicht schäme.”*

Pirvate was conceptualized to find collaborative and intersubjective agency in seemingly impossible and rigid settings, showing that there is a way out even from within institutions: What you really want, cannot be governed.

*“I cannot work here if I am not embarrassed”

with Mia Kaven, Zoe Maria Rossmannek, Stammtisch Flutwelle, Anton Stammsen, Jonathan Ungemach, B_in Bad Weather, Shen Nan, Wang Haiqing, Ren Pan, Hanna Doose, Sasha Martens, Vic Shep and many more.

SIEHST MICH IN DER SPACE BAR WIE ICH MICH LEER TASTE
(DISORGANIZATION DOLLZ)
70 x 60
2023

This work consists of a third generation orgy of preps based on an online pixel paper doll phenomenon called DollZ from 1997 and partitions from a fresco in the Pompeian House of Pan depicting the Battle of Issues between Alexander the Great and Darius III. The painting points to an antithesis or impossibility, one of which is that the dismembered, administered body cannot overcome the neo-Biedermeier.

THE MAGICIAN
160 x 190
2023

A portal of daimons, the dispensers of fate, forms around a magician, that is, one who reorganises reality. Among them are the Measureless, Metamorphosis and Mnemosyne. These are accompanied by a writing system of pictographic and ideographic signs called Bliss Symbolics, a pasigraphy invented by Charles K. Bliss. It is one of the first systems to have been used as an assistive communication tool for people who, as a result of motor or cognitive speech disorders, are unable or very limited in their ability to communicate with others through spoken language. Since its first use in 1971 at the Ontario Crippled Children‘s Centre (Toronto, Canada), Bliss Symbols have appeared as a way of graphically representing communication content on communication boards. When children at the Centre invented their own words with the language system, it became too much for Charles K. Bliss and he sued the hospital for misrepresentation and breach of licence.

SPAR CLUB
savings club and pillar with post box and sculptures, map of the performers and contributors, vibrating wand torch
2023