Opening: behind closed doors

How Was Your Day? (Kurztext in Deutsch)

Fakt ist, dass die grosse Mehrheit der Künstler/innen einem zweiten, nicht künstlerischen Arbeitsverhältnis nachgehen. Doch diese Realität – das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Sphäre des rein Ökonomischen – markiert in der Kunst ein zentrales Tabu. Diesem Thema nimmt sich die Neue Galerie mit dem Fabian Hachen und Mischa Düblin an und projezieren in einer Livesendung den 'normalen' Arbeitsalltag des Künstlerduos Thylacine. Um dem Tabu gerecht zu werden, wird die Ausstellung unter Abwesenheit jeglicher Besucher stattfinden. Die Dokumentation des Experiments stellt den einzigen Zugriff auf die nicht öffentliche Situation dar.

In collaboration with

Artists: Thylacine > Website

While we may not like to admit it, the fact of the matter is, the vast majority of successful artists today do not solely support themselves via their artistic practices. Indeed, they ensure financial stability via secondary workforce jobs. This is simply reality, however deliberately and widely ignored by the public and media alike. The relationship of the artist to the sphere of purely economic non-artistic labor has thus come to constitute a significantly taboo subject in contemporary art, and it is precisely this ignorance that marks the point of departure for the project 'How Was Your Day?'.

For this piece, Neue Galerie projected a live broadcast of the daily working lives of acclaimed performance artists Fabian Hachen and Micha Düblin at the OLM Space. The exhibition took place in the absence of any visitors, and was therefore entirely unseen. In so being, ‘How Was Your Day?’ sought to represent the discrepancy between working artists’ lived reality and the public’s romanticized, false conception of their daily artistic production.

A subsequent publication, featuring documentation of the exhibition’s livestream and installation constitutes the only means by which the public may view the exhibition, as it took place in derelict space under a highway bridge in Neuchâtel, now used for artistic and curatorial experiments.

60 Seconds: The Making of an Exhibition

Neue Galerie is a curatorial initiative by Sandino Scheidegger & Luca Müller

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