SPECIAL EVENT / GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN
ARTIST TALK: 2 MAY 2025, 6 PM
AES+F & Margret Eicher in conversation with Dr. Sebastian Baden (Director Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt)
“Reality, what is the world?”
The artist Margret Eicher and the art collective AES+F will speak with Dr Sebastian Baden about their works in the current exhibition at Galerie Michael Janssen.
For both Margret Eicher and AES+F, the appropriation and reworking of pop cultural and art historical images are central to their work. The artists create individual remixes of the imagery of visual culture, producing new compositions that reconstruct figurative scenes. Their work shows people adopting particular poses, portrayed as historic or public figures, presented as models, soldiers or in religious motifs, such as the Renaissance-era sacra conversazione, or depicted in the aesthetic of gaming culture or fashion marketing.
Blending critique and irony, AES+F and Margret Eicher take up iconic motifs from the analogue and digital worlds and decontextualise them in order to reveal their often political or ideological content. Their work addresses a familiar concept for the public use and ideologisation of images and texts: propaganda, which serves to construct clear and exclusionary values, such as nationalist and glorifying notions of identity. The repertoire of propaganda encompasses the representation of power and submission, depictions of war, scenes from political and economic life as well as the diverse forms of presentation in pop culture, which draw on stereotypes and clichés.
From the perspective of 2025, the artist talk will examine the sources of the works in the exhibition, exploring their references to the present and its military propaganda, political demonstrations of power, religious self-staging, AI-assisted transcultural fashion advertising and the design of a mass-market aesthetic that toys with motifs of revolution in real virtuality.
The discussion will centre on the neologism “popaganda”, a portmanteau of pop culture and propaganda, and seek to shed light on the artists’ critical stance towards it in their practice.
