9 February 2017
SCHAUM – Self-Optimisation
Exhibition Opening with Performance, 17 February 2017, 7 pm
Exhibition until 2 April
On Friday 17 February, the Akademie der Künste opened the exhibition SELF-OPTIMISATION by the artists’ collective SCHAUM. In this exhibition, SCHAUM investigates the question of why and how individuals are focusing increasingly on themselves. Taking visual aesthetics as a method, the artists’ collective explores the mechanisms fuelling the exaggerated drive to individualism today. Around ten pictorial works and installations especially created and produced for the exhibition are now on show in the passageway of the Akademie’s Pariser Platz venue.
On the conceptual design of the exhibition, SCHAUM noted: “Self-optimisation as the result of depoliticisation reflects the unease over personal opinions just as much as the futile search for individual happiness. In contrast, economic ideas and thinking have become firmly established in the private sphere, so we can now only feel our values and our uniqueness through optimising our mental and physical abilities in ways that are measurable and visible for all. The self-optimisation process includes nearly all areas of our lives, and hence in the end becomes political.”
The Rostock-based artists’ collective SCHAUM, founded in 2009, works conceptionally with photography, painting, graphics, objects, installations and performance. In this process, the collective develops self-reflective, critical approaches to art and culture from their image of themselves as exemplary of the smallest unit of society.
SCHAUM – Self-Optimisation
Exhibition Opening, Performance: Friday 17 February 2017, 7 pm, Free admission
Exhibition duration: 18 February – 2 April 2017, daily 10 am – 10 pm, Free admission
Akademie der Künste, Passage, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin, Tel. 030 20057-1000