Anna-Sophie Berger – KUB Billboards curated by Eva Birkenstock

Starting in 2016 KUB Billboards constitute an independent line of programming to enhance the visibility of a younger generation of artists. KUB Billboards concentrate in particular on those artists who have been growing up in the midst of recent epochal turning points: starting from the demise of state socialism, and the increasingly globalized world that followed from it, and that, throughout the 1990s, was more and more superimposed by a digitalized capitalization of all spheres of life. In the network economy in which now we live, the internet, the logic of algorithmic processing, social media and surveillance are conditions of our everyday existence. The perception of our »reality« has drastically changed, and with it the modes of its conceptualization. To kick off the new program, the artist Anna-Sophie Berger presents a series of diverse visual materials: a reproduction of a mandala-drawing colored as part of a self-therapeutic exercise, a selfie, a dystopian landscape taken from an IOS game and a reproduction of a work by Hans Baldung. It is not the indexicality of the images, Berger focuses on, but their potential of being transferred into various constellations as well as being produced, reproduced, appropriated, tagged and permanently altered. Its heterogeneity connects the series to the pictorial logic of today’s media, in which text is translated by images in the process of communication. Thus, the respective subject generates the context of the heterogeneous singular images through selection. Berger’s works, snapshots and selfies appear in various virtual and real spaces, simultaneously and equivalently as objects in an exhibition space, as digital posts, as documentation or as reference. Apart from the passionate inquiry of artistic agency on the image plane, the reference to liquid substances, transformation and gender, the series stages those processes that render visible how her works present themselves and can undergo changes — and thus destabilize the difference between artistic object and documentation.