‘caps’
by Jan Kunkel
Exhibition 15 February – 15 March 2025
Opening Friday, 14 February, 6-9 pm.
Finissage Sunday, 16 March, 3-6 pm.
Opening Friday, 14 February, 6-9 pm.
Finissage Sunday, 16 March, 3-6 pm.
Ordinarily, caps conjures an artificial upper ceiling—concealing for protection (to keep control) or ornament (to brag). In caps, Jan Kunkel snaps that cap, substituting historical tracers for new masters at a moment when anti-fascist talk has grown increasingly detached from the historical events and material realities of anti-colonial struggle.
This kind of attempt to ahistorically cast forms of organizing as ‘purist’ is indicative of Western mimeticism, positioned along the continuum of politics/aesthetics. caps cleaves this scaffold, agitating for a lived reality that conditions histories while foreclosing the confines of self-contained logics. It goes without saying that caps aligns itself with the place of being where the symptom already was—a site of desire rather than appearance. Insisting that the world is no automated given, it animates a recurring question: What is the political/aesthetic when caps surface as a scene of fantasy?
For au JUS, Kunkel deepens her research into the conditions of image production—how they become embedded within the pictorial material and its (semiotic) surfaces. Traversing realms of social cohesion, tormented ontology, and libidinal attachment, she engages with the double bind of performance/procurement—an apparatus designed to maintain the politico-aesthetic economy, where the Other is permitted so long as its presence remains non-intrusive, so long as the Other is not truly Other.
In response, caps operates within the dual status of formalist analysis and ephemeral gesture, treating procured objects as sculptural instances. Kunkel’s installative approach unfolds—for the first time in au JUS’s two year history—across all three rooms of the gallery building. With caps, she stages a distinct extrapolation of the “Congress against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression” (Brussels 1927), bringing its occluded contemporaneity to the fore. Through caps, Kunkel contours, echoes, and polemicizes sources such as Aimé Césaire’s “Phantoms” (1962) and Milan Kunc’s “Penetration of the Dialectic” (1992) in an attempt to spoil the ever-imminent process of self-historicization.
Hinging on the omissions conveyed by the mirror of purified history—which grounds being in appearance—a collaborative video work by Jan Kunkel and Linda O. Elsner awaits audiences in the gallery’s basement, an area typically closed to the public. The piece alludes to structuralist filmmaking, founded on the “free association of the two producers” as they confront a mutual concern: forging solidarity and incompatibility.
caps is accompanied by an essay written by Sebastjan Brank. The exhibition is further complemented by a semi-public program of collective study, organized by the Sex Negativity Research Group, taking place the weekend following the vernissage (February 15-16).
»Here, the distinction between the rational Enlightenment accumulation of knowledge and libidinal investment comes to a screeching halt. Melanie Klein termed this the “epistemophilic instinct”: the erotics of knowledge accumulation, the will to omniscience. The little girl’s
“perverse intensity of knowledge” is subjected to prolonged release—or to its complete withholding. She is never able to complete her work on Capital, perpetually edged by the very system she meticulously exposes as violent—a quintessential neurotic, akin to Hamlet, who cannot act on his desire because fulfilling it would mean confronting the loss of his attachment to an unrealized fantasy. Little Girl Marx’s pleasure lies in endless deferral, along with the inherent disappointment of the theoretical object of investigation and the peculiar pleasure that this disappointment affords.« (Sebastjan Brank, What Can Little Girl Marx Teach Us About The Pleasures Of Disappointment?)
Jan Kunkel works with language, objects, and their dissimulation. Recent exhibitions and performances include Kunstverein München, Munich (2023); Studiengalerie 1.357, Frankfurt (2023); and di volta in volta, Paris (2024).
Linda O. Elsner is a performer and actress. She has worked with renowned artists such as SIGNA, Autumn Knight, LTwills, and Nils Amadeus Lange, while also pursuing her own independent projects. Currently an ensemble member at Schauspiel Dortmund, Elsner‘s recent lead role is as ‘Antigone’ (2025).
Exhibition text (eng)
Worklist
Found mirror, cardboard, tape, photo prints, frameless glass picture holders.
124 x 21 x 10 cm
Found mirror, cardboard, tape, photo prints, frameless glass picture holders.
124 x 21 x 10 cm
Found mirror, cardboard, tape, photo prints, frameless glass picture holders.
124 x 21 x 10 cm
photo print, frameless glass picture holder.
10 x 15 x 5,5 cm
photo print, frameless glass picture holder.
10 x 15 x 5,5 cm
Wood, acryl, perforated steel, photo print, paper, pencil.
61 x 29,4 x 1,5 cm
Wood, acryl, perforated steel, photo print, paper, pencil.
61 x 29,4 x 1,5 cm
Wood, acryl, perforated steel, photo print, paper, pencil.
61 x 29,4 x 1,5 cm
Mixed media on linen with limewood frame.
30 x 40 x 2 cm (32 x 42 x 3 cm)
Marble, acryl, photo print, glass.
103 x 14 x 2 cm
Special thanks to Linda O. Elsner and Steph Holl-Trieu.
Oil and pencil on found linen, glass.
76,2 x 100 x 2,5 cm
Figure traversing the Trax as bound to the Congress against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression
(renewed membership), 2025
Oil, acryl, passepartout, pencil, xerox print with frameless glass picture holder.
30 x 40 x 1 cm
Series of two (1/2)
b. Insisting On Ruination Rather Than Resistance, 2025
Oil and pencil on found linen, glass.
76,2 x 100 x 2,5 cm
Suede, perforated steel, drywall panel, tiles, plastic, concrete.
37,5 x 47 x 26,5 cm
Agbanadonium (slowed + reverb), 2025
1080p video, 59:28 min. (loop)
Agbanadonium (slowed + reverb), 2025
1080p video, 59:28 min. (loop)
Agbanadonium (slowed + reverb), 2025
1080p video, 59:28 min. (loop)
Agbanadonium (slowed + reverb), 2025
1080p video, 59:28 min. (loop)
a. Arch Liberal (under the aegis of the colonial relation)
b. Trap Brain (a failure to think the mirror stage)
c. Irreconcilable Antagonism (you aren‘t never going anywhere)
Mixed media on linen.
100 x 70 x 2 cm each
Series of three
Ceramic, acryl, concrete.
34,5 x 29,8 x 4,5 cm
b. Organize! (Congress Table), 2025
Mixed media.
55 x 55 x 10 cm