"If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen", co-curated show at Gallery Kai Hoelzner, Berlin

"If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen", a group show created and installed with Kai Hoelzner

Pressrelease

If You Can`t Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Kitchen
March 7th - April 4th 2009

“After a long silence Heilmann spoke, saying that works like those of Pergamon should always be reinterpreted, until an inversion is achieved and the terrigena have been awoken from darkness and slavery, and show themselves in their true form.“

One of the most interesting developments of recent history has been the achievement of, if not the sovereignty of discourse, then at least cultural sovereignty by the class that in earlier decades could still have been called “the proletariat”. It was not, as described by Peter Weiss in Asthetik des Widerstands, the difficulty of doing evening courses and learning Kafka, Greek, Guitar or Guernica after a long shift in the factory, but the ahistorical adoption and reuse of images and so-called attitudes that smoothed the way to the Mount Olympus of contemporary culture.

This can be seen in the terrigena's participation in the cultural production process today no longer being based on their revolt against political and cultural disenfranchisement, but on the extrinsic pleasure principle described in long passages of Peter Weiss' book. It is not agonising over culture or education that became the hammering and chiselling that leads to a self-determined malleable social form, but body image and celebrity culture. These have proved to be more effective and above all available tools for wresting culture from the hands of “those in power”.
“If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” is an exhibition that brings the giant frieze of the Pergamon Museum to the gallery spaces of Kottbusser Tor. As a wallpaper covering the frieze takes on a strategy of transhistoric, imitational accessing of images. Laminated white kitchen cupboards recreated from furniture panels impregnate the decontextualised material with new myths, their subtext reaching from 1937 and Hans Coppis' kitchen back to the masonry of Pergamon castle hill, from which heads and limbs were taken over the centuries to provide domestic building material. Where elements of the friezes are missing the incomplete areas are replaced with self-made images and reliefs.