BUBBLES #5: Fuerer Nielsen – Leaking Overdrive

The work Goodbye welcomes viewers to the exhibition in an ironic and playfully irritating way. The fifth exhibition on the annual theme of Bubbles refers to temporary pop-ups, for example by taking up the global aesthetics of pop-ups with the striking blue color and experimenting with the meaning of spaces through visual codes, objects, and narrative stagings. The paint runs as a marker through the exhibition and can be found as a surface of Bear Market. It is reminiscent of the reduced, recognizable language of contemporary graphic design, which is used from urban sales areas to digital storefronts. Their repetition creates a visual branding that draws attention – a strategy that is transferred here from the context of consumption into the exhibition space. The exhibition thus examines the proximity between art spaces and sales spaces: in both, objects are embedded in a narrative, relationships are established and meanings are created. At the same time, the boundary between capitalist places and spaces such as offspaces is explored, which consciously position themselves outside the established, market-oriented gallery business and thus enable other forms of experimentation, discourse and social debate.

A drink dispenser and potato pancakes in the shape of bears initially appear as familiar everyday objects. However, due to their changed materiality, their scale and the detachment from their original function, they become artistic forms and thus the starting points for an investigation of value. The ominous, circular arrangement of Bear Market creates an almost conspiratorial atmosphere and makes you think of closed cycles.

The Soda Fountain takes up these questions as a computer-generated form directly translated into the material physical space on a technological level: digitally developed and 3D printed. At the same time, the beverage dispenser refers to the logic of endless refill and consumption as a potentially interminable cycle. The reference to the readymade of art history is present, but is expanded by the digital creation process. The focus is not on the found object, but on a technologically reproducible design. The exhibition combines questions of consumer culture, technology and capitalist systems. Familiar forms and visual strategies are transferred into the art space, shifted and relieved of their original function. The exhibition itself appears like a pop-up and Goodbye is at the same time a greeting, a farewell and an invitation to consider the exhibition space as a temporary system in which values and bubbles can be critically questioned.

The exhibition was created as part of Svenja Clauss' guest curatorship.

Fuerer Nielsen. Andreas Fürer (*1993) and Sonjoi Nielsen (*1994) are an artist duo from Zurich. They develop sculptural and installation works inspired by pop culture and everyday aesthetics. In doing so, they deal with social and economic systems as well as phenomena and trends that can be understood as bubbles. They have already exhibited in Switzerland, Austria, Bulgaria and Estonia.