Sven Johne – Anomalies of the Early 21st Century / Some Case Studies

Sven Johne
Anomalies of the Early 21st Century / Some Case Studies
16.1. – 27.2.2016

"Start every morning with a smile", "I didn’t make this decision in order to be a hero", "I’m merely a human, not a machine" – in his new, extensive cycle of text and images called Anomalies of the Early 21st Century / Some Case Studies Sven Johne explores social dropouts – voluntarily, involuntarily, unknown, well-known and anonymous. The scope spreads from literally drop-outs that actually leave their society in order to live autarkic in the woods or elsewhere, to those that refuse to follow society’s maintstream up to those that are forced to drop-out, those that are completely unfree: the unemployed and homeless. Facing these reports are reports on the "happy few" the winners of the neo-liberal all-round capitalization.

In his intermedial game, alternating between fiction, narration and documentation, Johne approaches general and highly subjective themes of our time with humour and subversiveness: the question of self-optimization, specific fear of exclusion and failure, the search for individual fulfillment and the promise of a better, fairer world. The background for this collection of laconic, documentary-like anomalies consists in the global market fundementalism of the past 25 years, marking all those as sentimental, naive or just as losers that have lost faith in it. The portraits are dedicated to those "fallen" people.

Sven Johne's works have been recently shown at, among others: Creating Realities, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Welcome to the Jungle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; History is a Warm Gun, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; more Konzeption Conception now, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Sven Johne, Some Engels, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; 5. Thessaloniki Biennale, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece; Risk Society. Individualization in Young Contemporary Art from Germany, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipai, Taiwan; Nur hier, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Jutta, Kunsthalle Bielefeld; The Doubt of the Stage Prompters, Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg

He will be awarded for his artistic work the Fine Arts Prize 2016 of the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin this Spring.