Humor my love, Humor

Entry at the back corner of the building facing W. Michael Blumenthal Akademie des Jüdischen Museums Berlin.

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websites
frontviews.de
www.roam-projects.eu

 

 

Programme

Vernissage

Thu 12 Dec 6 - 9 pm

X-mas Roamance ! The Julklapp
/ with a gift from the heart

Fri 20 Dec 5 - 9 pm

 

Julklapp, dices with an art twist and Glühwein

Give something small and clever from the heart or simply art. And get wonderful things in return. Let's roll the dice!

Finissage

Fri 24 January 6 - 9 pm

with Artist Talk by Julia Meyer-Brehm + special guests

7:07 - 8:08 pm

 

It is said that laughter is healthy. But in German there is also the expression, I laugh myself to death. Laughter is a coin with two sides. You flip it and it is up to fate which side it falls on. Joy or pain. The laugher and the laughed at. Laughter is an experience and, in the purest sense, something over which we have no real control. Laughter is something universal. Laughter is power, and laughter releases happiness hormones. So when two people who hold very different views meet, laughing together can literally create a connection, at least lowering the high hurdle of rejection in the experience of common ground.

 

Wars, doomsday moods, despots. 

 

In the so-called free Western world, including Germany, money and freedom are increasingly being cut from the arts. Politicians on the right-wing fringes of society are now openly questioning the meaning of art and culture for so-called ordinary people, what it achieves or fails to achieve, what relevance various cultural offerings may have in the everyday lives of the “working class”. 

 

The artist, the creator of new worlds of experience, is transfigured here into an enemy of society, into someone who does not work, who is too fine or too lazy and would therefore be better off doing a “proper” job instead of bringing “things” into this world that no one understands or considers “good”. What counts, what seems to have market value, what is tolerated are banalities, clownism. 

 

In all this increasing darkness of mind, in the general questioning of life plans and realities, there is a group of people scattered throughout the art world who are defying these wildly surging tensions with a clever, subtle, humorous view. Artists who seek the light in the world even in the smallest, most deeply felt works. Who struggle deeply in their works to pick up their fellow and neighboring human beings. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes deafeningly loudly into life, whether it be with a wink or a bitter lament at the events of the world, hope always lives in their works. The sincere hope of using their works to tell the many truths of this world with humor, and thus to oppose the supposed truth of many worlds. 

 

Since humor is known to be a matter of taste, it makes sense to approach the narratives in the artists' works on the basis of flavors. 

 

Salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami are the 5 directions that can be discovered in the exhibition, sometimes more subtly, sometimes more strongly, thus giving the viewer an exciting taste of familiar, new and unusual worlds. 

 

Humor in works of art represents something very special. Although humor is always a question of personal taste, as a subject it demands that artists make it legible. Sometimes very subtle, sometimes louder, it always speaks clearly and thus addresses a very wide range of people from the most diverse worlds of experience. There is something wonderfully mysterious in the necessary objectivity - whatever the individual may read from the pictures and sculptures, whether it is a smile, a smile or rejection of the subject, art and the experience of it happens in the meantime. Quite unobtrusively for most people, almost imperceptible, so hidden in the obvious depiction. The experience of art can thus emerge completely unfiltered and free from the deepest depths and create true added value, a far more lasting touch. Here the artist does not have to explain his art, does not appear as a stranger, but reveals what artists are by nature, inwardly connected and turned towards all humanity. Here, art speaks freely, even to those who otherwise do not listen to what always and forever wants to speak to them through the artist.

 

In a moment of global togetherness that has become necessary, in which otherness can be seen and experienced by everyone, more and more people are reacting with rejection, alienation and exclusion. This is precisely why it seems more urgent than ever to turn our backs on the often frivolous banalities and clownism and to allow the world to experience connectedness through a very special kind of art. In a truly cold time, a warming exhibition celebrates the great power of subtle, clever humour in the visual arts as a unique means of building bridges in times of increasingly cold social upheaval. 

 

In the exhibition ‘Humor my love, Humor’, art comes to life in perhaps its most beautiful form, in the gift of a smile.

 

 

Thorsten A. Kasper