Available on the market, within the shops, in shows, the commodities stand nonetheless, prepared for a single sort of exercise, particularly their alternate. Instance: a commodity marked at a particular value is topic to the fiction of full materials immutability, and never solely by human arms. Even nature should maintain its breath in the case of the commodity’s physique, or not less than for so long as the value is meant to remain the identical . . . Wherever a society’s foundational relations are lowered to commerce, a vacuum free from people’ guide and mental actions should be created, in order that on this vacuum their connection to society can take maintain. ¹

Contact glass, turn into window, turn into display screen, threshold an interface between one world and the following. Fingerprints, smears accumulate, traces of a want interrupted. Servitude, however frictionless. Worth exists within the thoughts, however how does it really feel in your hand? For essentially the most half, chances are you’ll by no means know. Reduce off from the objects and symbols that crowd the senses, the need of constructing it in a world designed to not be your personal.

“Within the Service of Actuality” is shot by way of retailer home windows and museum vitrines. Imaginative and prescient mediated by way of glass. Neither there nor right here, inside nor out. What you see isn’t a lot an in-between as an interim. Throughout not too distant lockdowns, storefronts in Düsseldorf and Berlin grew to become the leftovers of a actuality within the strategy of disappearing. Retailers outstripped by e-commerce; small companies obliterated by restaurant chains. Towards the rhythms of commerce, museums protect the previous for all eternity. Two worlds momentarily inoculated towards human life, heralding an inhuman time to come back.

Reflections are the suggestions on this communication system. The fantasy of unobstructed visible availability, abundance papers over its materials reverse—loss of life, shortage, and a poverty of expertise. The will to show overshadows any ostensible object. As suggestions, one world careens into one other, amplifying. House flattens, the general public vanishes, objects overlayed endlessly—in different phrases, communion, although not for us. An abundance of element borders on abstraction, albeit one which was all the time already there. Distinctions dissolved, every part equals every part, interchangeably. A dream logic, us sleepwalking, a logic all the identical.

at Baader-Meinhof, Omaha
till April 28, 2024