Simon Fujiwara explores the dominant images and narratives of our time in a process he calls ‘hyper engagement’ with the capitalist-entertainment worlds that shape how we communicate and consume. He is especially interested in the stories and strategies that individuals and societies use to define themselves and form their identities in a time where the internet manipulates and constructs our sense of reality. Crossing the boundaries of different media, Fujiwara works with video and installations, performance art, sculpture, painting and a wide range of technical media. 

At the centre of Empathy I is a 5D cinema inspired by theme park rides. Here the artist replaces the computer-generated fantasy worlds with real-life YouTube footage of personal, emotional and intense physical experiences shot by anonymous users. The experience of viewing the lives of others on screen is transformed into a powerful physical experience through the use of robotic moving seats synchronised to the movements of the camera. The intensity and speed of the images together with the physicality of the work overrides the brain’s ability to process meaning in the moment, offering instead heightened but simulated feelings of arousal, calm, fear and pleasure. Simon Fujiwara reflects here on the accelerated dynamic of our visual consumption – the sacrifices and gains we make as we increasingly experience life through a lens. 

Observations like these were the starting point for Empathy I. The accelerated dynamic of our visual consumption is resulting in a bitter battle for our attention. But the constantly growing volumes of available content and images are also resulting in a qualitative change. The most emotive image is the one that stays in our minds, whether it is bizarre, tragic, funny or exciting. It is not just our attention as receivers that follows this principle. Our pretensions to success as senders – which is measured in likes, shares, retweets and comments – are also guided by it. The digital and analogue worlds interact in this context through experiences and situations from our own real lives that are documented and staged via media. Validation is the objective of the digital response that we hope to achieve. This validation contributes significantly to how we form our personal identities. At the same time, demand is growing for intense digital visual experiences to consume, ones that promise diversion and stimulation. The self behaves like a product and a consumer in equal measure. In this way, it is able to satisfy its craving for validation as well as its curiosity and desire to watch.

However, intense, short-lived experiences leave an emptiness behind them. There is no narrative or dramatic arc leading to an emotional peak; instead, aborted climaxes follow non-stop one after another. Digital technology’s limited capacity to be a satisfying replacement for physical analogue experience and one’s own emotional sensations becomes the central theme in Empathy I. In this context, Simon Fujiwara asks how important physical experience is. Can physical experience be simulated? Do our bodies and minds actually operate in such a way that real emotions can be produced artificially? Or will there always be a crucial difference between what we physically and mentally experience and what is conveyed via media, no matter how far technology advances?

Simon Fujiwara reflects these developments by making us observers of, and participants in, different situations in a carefully planned dramatic composition. We enter a waiting area, just like the ones that we encounter in everyday life. We draw a number. There are places to sit and a water dispenser, and free Wi-Fi is available. Several editions of Fifty Shades of Grey lie on the table. In each copy, a bookmark marks the place where the two protagonists in the story freely enter into a sadomasochistic relationship and sign a contract governing it. The work points to the fact that, day in, day out, we consciously surrender ourselves to the internet and in particular to social media. It is also a comment on the contradictions in our society: its liberal and democratic values are at odds with what is idealised and eroticised in the novel, which was much criticised as misogynistic and pro-capitalist. Against this backdrop, the novel’s enormous success has been a source of preoccupation for Simon Fujiwara. During his research, he found out that so many copies of the novel had been given to the charity Oxfam that it begged people to stop donating it. The donated copies were impossible to sell, but they could not be recycled either because the glue in the binding turned out to be toxic. Thousands of books were left suspended in a kind of limbo, without any possible way in which they could be used. The artist decided to buy all of Oxfam’s stock and use it for his work in order to create a framework for reflection on this chain of paradoxes.

Johanna Adam

Simon Fujiwara grew up in Japan, Spain and the UK. He studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. The artist’s work is represented in numerous international collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Tate in London. He was the recipient of the 2010 Baloise Prize at Art Basel and the 2010 Frieze Cartier Award and a nominee of the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2019.

In her video work Rolling-A-Joint: Revisiting Spike Lee, Simnikiwe Buhlungu playfully creates audiovisual montages by combining spoken and written words with sound. She does not primarily see herself as a performance artist, but here she can be seen setting to work on extracts from scripts by Spike Lee (*1957 Atlanta, Georgia) and “deconstructing” them in an inquisitorial manner. She dissects, reworks and acts out the text. The acclaimed author, actor and director can without exaggeration be considered as a style-maker for an entire generation of Afro-American pop and film culture. His works are also referred to as “Spike Lee Joints” and directly compared to a perfectly rolled joint. Buhlungu takes inspiration from this, incorporating it into her video as a homage to the artist and a metaphorical act.

Her video works resemble investigations that fundamentally question the emergence and spread of knowledge. She often works with text-based media, video and installation art, always drawing on the theory that art forms such as film and sonic engagements, as a way to create a sense of belonging and solidarity between narratives within and beyond the African continent and its many placements within a global context.

Her interest lies in telling personal, transgenerational and socio-historical stories and weaving them into a web. These narratives raise issues that preoccupy her and pose questions that she wrestles with at times. The use of sound and oral narratives, publications ‒ and their dissemination ‒ form a large part of her artistic practice.

Miriam Barhoum

Simnikiwe Buhlungu currently lives in Amsterdam, where she has started her two
year residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.

Laure Prouvost creates intermedial installations that move between fiction and reality. Whether her works take the form of film, video, sound , sculpture or paintings, they always have strong narratives. However, they do not follow the model of a traditional, linear depiction. Rather, they overturn our expectations and perceptions of language. The artist creates a sensory context, playing with misunderstandings and illusions. The multi-layered possibilities for interpretation of the written word are a central element in Prouvost’s work. She merely seeks to hint with language and to suggest possibilities while leaving the final interpretation entirely to the viewer’s imagination. Prouvost’s manipulation of language recalls the Dadaists, the art movement that invented a nonsense language or sounds to demonstrate their rejection of the bourgeois way of life. She is inspired by the courage and the playfulness with which they handled language and experimented freely with it. This kind of experimentation is also part of her own artistic practice.

Gisèle Gonon works in diverse media, often combining sculpture, drawings, video and sound. She is especially interested in the forms, colours, functions and social context from which a medium emerges. She links her research with collecting the materials that she works with: objects, tools and acts become altered and alienated from their original function. Gonon’s multimedia installation Work With Us calls into question the substance and methods of the modern world of work, exposing the advertising language that companies utilise to recruit their staff.

Job adverts filled with loud promises of creative freedom, personal development and fulfilment can be found everywhere on the labour market as companies seek to capture the interest of potential candidates. Such adverts are especially common in the world of start-ups: “Think big and act fast”, “A positive environment” and “Go for it and own it” are phrases from the audio loop in Gisèle Gonon’s work. Overwhelmed by recruitment adverts that promise heaven and earth, we experience the labour market as a complex system of incentives, promises and requirements that extend far beyond the professional sphere, encroaching on our personal lives.

The artist thereby casts a critical eye over the capitalist belief system and sheds light on its influence on the world of work.

The artist thereby casts a critical eye over the capitalist belief system and sheds light on its influence on the world of work. “The new spirit of capitalism” * is also reflected in start-up culture. It seems as if it is no longer enough today to merely work for a company. Instead, employees must internalise its corporate values and identify with them completely. Work experience and professionalism are disregarded. Gonon’s goal is to disrupt and interrupt mechanical processes and to stage a kind of sabotage. All of this is linked to a strong political undertone, yet still always full of humour and subtlety. Her distorted representation of the “coffee fountain” is an especially striking example of how she achieves this. Here the artist refers to the noria effect, which describes a method for calculating the difference in wage costs between new, younger employees (with lower salaries) and their older counterparts (with higher salaries).

Miriam Barhoum

Born in France, the Artists has studied at the School of Art and Design in Saint- Étienne, she lives and works in Berlin and is the Co-Founder of the Collective CCPC (Collisions, Cataclysmes et Permis de Construire).

Dries Verhoeven works at the intersection between performance and installation, seeking to complicate the relationship between viewers, performers, real-life situations and art. He often collaborates with members of marginalized groups and ‘outcasts’. Instead of conveying unambiguous statements about the lives of these people, he seeks to evoke feelings of unbalance and doubt in those who engage with his interventions.

In Songs for Thomas Piketty, we hear the singing and begging voice of a homeless Albanian man , whom Verhoeven met in front of a Supermarket in the Quantiusstraße, Bonn. . The man is not visible. His voice, played in an endless loop, comes from a tape recorder positioned at the entrance of the museum. The work refers to oral requests for money which are nowadays forbidden in many cities, including Bonn, where only silent forms of panhandling are allowed. Verhoeven examines the visibility of poverty in public space, and scrutinizes the feelings of discomfort we might have when confronted with those who are, or pretend to be, poor.  

In Western Europe, where prosperity is still predominant, poverty is on the rise. The stronger EU economies have been invited to respond to requests for help and solidarity from the weaker economies of other member states. Homeless people, less fortunate people from the Balkans and former refugees populate cities in western Europe.

The economist Thomas Piketty has shown that the gulf between rich and poor will widen even more in the coming years.

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David Shrigley uses humour and brutal honesty as artistic means. His drawings, paintings and animated films are often based on an interaction between the image and the text, while his sculptures, sound installations and interventions in public spaces combine striking visual force with subtle jokes. He finds food for his biting satire in clichés and conversations between people in daily life, but also in the art world. Inflatable Swan Thing and The Artist are two performative installations by Shrigley that question the concept of art and the traditional understanding of authorship.

There are probably not many artists whose works are on display in museums, galleries and art fairs, but also sold in the fashion and lifestyle sector. The Inflatable Swan Thing has its origins in an idea that was born out of necessity: when David Shrigley was faced with the problem of a sculpture that was too large to transport to Japan, without a moment’s hesitation he produced an inflatable version – problem solved! This work was followed by a series of smaller, affordable swans for swimming pools. Shrigley does not see his art as being restricted to a particular medium. This applies as much to the development of his ideas as it does to their implementation in form and materials. The installation The Artist produces drawings continuously, but they are not created by the artist’s hand. Instead, a small robot (a vacuum cleaner wearing a wig) guides the pens that it holds in its nostrils. Shrigley, whose work largely begins with drawing, clearly reveals one thing with this installation: the execution is not the actual moment of artistic creation. The artistic act always lies in the idea, whatever technique or medium is used. When it comes to the distribution of his works, Shrigley is also more open than is common in the art market. His works are not only on sale in renowned galleries and at international art fairs; they can also be mass-produced items available for purchase in his online shop and from other vendors. This form of boundary crossing and consciously playing with the conventions of particular environments – and especially the customs of the art world – are themes to which Shrigley constantly returns. Humour always plays an important role in his work, but the questioning that he expresses with it raises issues of serious concern for him. He not only questions the hierarchies that are used to distinguish between “high” and “low” art, or between high culture and subculture; he also playfully moves between these fields and between different media. He takes aim both at his role as an artist and at the rules that the art world keeps trying to impose on him.

Johanna Adam

David Shrigley studied at the Glasgow School of Art
in Scotland from 1988 to 1991.
He was a Turner Prize nominee in 2013.