#SleekAlphaSelfies with Christopher Williams and Bernadette Corporation taken with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.
In our “Me, Myself and Art” series, in collaboration with Samsung Galaxy Alpha, Sleek takes an immersive approach to the art world. Via the medium of writer and stylist Ella Plevin, and her shiny new Samsung Galaxy Alpha, we bring the art world to you in a uniquely personalised way, utilising performance, selfies and video to present new perspectives on the art scene. Check out #sleekalphaselfie to win a phone for yourself.
I haven’t visited Hamburger Bahnhof’s permanent collection displays for over a year so it was a pleasure to discover a couple of my favourite artists now on view in exhibitions “Wall Works” and “Official Welcome” this week. I used the opportunity to validate my credentials as creator of the hashtag #artduckface while I wandered through the museum with artist Natalia Ibanez Lario.
Bernadette Corporation taken with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.
Bernadette Corporation have been cutting a critical line through the cloths of fashion and media myths and industry long before generation #normcore or #healthgoth. I love their sprawling body of work spread over satirical fashion shoots and shows, documentaries, text and garments: corporate culture suggests a sense of order, structure and rules but this corporation’s work is sprawling and messy, slipping from genre to another. Their playful multidisciplinary approach paired with a cutting condemnatory tone reflects the most influential aspect of the Bernadette Corporation legacy: complicit radicalism. The group chose to work from within commercial networks rather than drop out like the punks of yore in order to underline both the ineffectual strategies of traditional leftist dissent and contemporary notions of self and cultural production.
Bernadette Corporation taken with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.
Bernadette Corporation taken with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.
There’s plenty of online writing and documentation of Bernadette Corporation’s two decades of activity and (although I was happy to encounter it again) the work feels more at home on the internet than in the vitrines, plinths and gallery walls. I like Bennett Simpson’s 2004 description in Artforum of Bernadette Corporation as a “society-reading machine” but I think it’s a machine best viewed from within the factory (online, in shops and magazines etc). I can see why the collective resisted showing in galleries for so long.
#sleekalphaselfie with artist Natlia Ibanez Lario and work by Katharina Grosse. Taken with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.
Another artist fond of chaos, fashion and a kind of cheerful resistance is Katharina Grosse. I first saw her work in person during Julian Zigerli’s SS14 presentation “At The End Of The World To The Left”, in which spiky-haired, nuclear bronzed models marched past a large paint-splattered orb made by Grosse, wearing prints from a collaboration between the artist and designer. Her striking rainbow spattered fallen tree is part of the museum’s permanent rotating exhibition of items from the Christian Flick collection – in this case, “Wall Works” which addresses different conceptual approaches to the wall from a variety of artists working after 1960.
Text von Ella Plevin
To see more from our Me, Myself and Art series and to enter to win a Samsung Galaxy Alpha of your own, check out our #SleekAlphaSelfie competition
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