With the invitation to the Kunsthalle’s programme and its strong emphasis on collectivity, we were faced with the challenge to elaborate a shared understanding of this term. Reflecting on our previous activities as a class at an art university, it became apparent that our driving force as a group was not the communal production of artworks, but rather the connections established through the discourse on mutual research interests. In the past, our most intense phases of exchange had always been fueled by the curation of exhibitions. Therefore we decided to aim for the creation of an exhibition which would include individual pieces, but place special emphasis on the interconnections between the works through a prominent display structure.
It was important for us to create a structure that works on a metaphorical level, but also creates a strong pictorial element as an exhibition architecture.

For the first part called “The Engine”, we embraced the spatial limitations of the pandemic by locating our exhibition in an online space. Instead of replicating a white cube, we wanted to embrace the virtual potential of unconstrained scaling of artworks and their surroundings, and came up with the idea of using the model of a Mercedes Benz engine as an exhibition space. The engine model, a OM5502LA truck engine, is accompanied by a chat interface that mimics a Discord server, in which visitors to the website could interact with each other and with the works. During the times of social and physical distancing, Discord had turned into our main medium of exchange.
When Kunsthalle Baden‑Baden invited us to contribute to a physical exhibition later in 2021, we quickly settled on designing a physical framework for those pieces. Although our research interests span across a wide range of disciplines and mediums, we figured out a shared interest in capitalism, in particular how it is shaped by the network conditions of the present. This led us to looking for instances where this ungraspable and abstract subject would manifest physically - and brought us to using Amazon shelves as an architectural unit to create new sense relations between our physical art objects.

2020 surely was a challenging year in every aspect of life and most definitely also affected our way of working together as a class. Although we managed quite well with the class meetings being online at the time, but what was missing were the 5-minute break chats or lunchtime conversations that are essential to the social bonds we form in class. The invitation to the September 2020 gathering was one of the few moments in the first year of the pandemic when we were able to meet in person as a class to work on the project and develop our digital exhibition concept into an on-site spatial concept. The opportunity to meet with the class in an open forum and work in a space for on-site discussion and exchange was a rewarding experience for all involved.

In addition, the exchange with other classes and artistic strategies during and before the pandemic was an engaging experience. We were particularly impressed by the collaborative practice of, for example, the disciplines of theater or film production, where a communal approach was an integral part in the process of art production. In the visual arts, the myth of the lone genius is unfortunately still very present, so the collective approaches of the performances and different forms of collaboration made the gathering an inspiring place that made us rethink our levels of collaboration through shared discourse. In addition to that, the gathering enabled us to get to know the city of Baden‑Baden, its history and museums a little better, which allowed us to relate to the city in a more direct way . However, not only a more tangible connection to the city was important to us, but especially to the premises of the Kunsthalle, which helped us develop our exhibition architecture.
One challenge we faced over time was clearly the composition of the group’s participants, which changed over time from the digital project to the physical project. We tried to respond flexibly to this change, creating a process of group consolidation guided by an exploration of the new contextual overlaps between the two projects and their concepts, as well as a search for a new curatorial structure for the project. In retrospect, the most difficult moment was not the lockdown phase of the pandemic, but the transitional situations when things were more normal, but not yet back to normal, and we had to ask ourselves what we could temporarily sacrifice and what conditions were absolutely necessary to work on the project.

As a class with an emphasis on time-based media practices, we aim to interact with different media infrastructures and communication channels as well as aim to be informed about such infrastructures. When we started to implement a Discord server as our main communication platform during Covid, our usage was quite naturally accompanied by a reflection of that structure. A Discord server is a kind of group chat which enables the division of chats into different subtopics or threads where users can communicate. Through this infrastructure we had already organized our class structure and communication for the semester (e.g. exhibition thread, work process thread, weekly critique thread, meme thread, but also thematic threads on topics such as anthropocene, geopolitics, materiality or gender and style politics).
We kept and adjusted this structure for the Baden‑Baden project and tried to manage, delegate and distribute the tasks and responsibilities that go into the process of planning a group exhibition as best we can. However, this did not prevent us from meeting regularly (online / hybrid) as a whole group to share our thoughts about the concept. With a SketchUp model and shared screen, we planned the exhibition architecture together with the whole group.
Despite the division of tasks and delegation of responsibilities, we tried to facilitate a hierarchy-free group structure by allowing each person to contribute on an equal footing. The distribution of tasks was also based on voluntariness of the participants. The organizational structure via Discord enabled a transparent communication of the individual groups for everyone in a manner which was not completely disorganized but structured by the threads. Interestingly, with settling on the idea of the warehouse shelf architecture, a lot of the individual artworks took on forms that mimic the aesthetics of commercial consumer goods.

Since we do not have a collective artistic practice in the sense that we develop a collective artwork as a class, but rather our collective engagement in the class focuses on discursive exchange and collaborative exhibition making, the organizational structure did not influence the individual artistic positions as much. A stronger influence was exerted by logistical considerations concerning the transport of particularly large artistic works or the weight. The common exhibition architecture, which emerged from a collaborative brainstorming process among the group in which everyone participated, presented another challenge in terms of the medium, scale, and weight of the works.

In the course of the project development, we were in regular exchange about the development of each other’s projects for the group exhibition, the overall concept of the exhibition, and the production processes of the exhibition structure we developed. In addition to that, we tried to have regular feedback sessions within the class as well as the curating team from Kunsthalle Baden‑Baden, which would be reported back to the whole group.

Today communications infrastructure and logistics are often provided by private companies. Mercedes and Amazon are specific examples, but they serve to picture a general systemic relation: We all are forced to live our lives using these systems – but our efforts benefit the owners of these systems.
We found that this embedding of our work to develop a critical stance while necessarily speaking from within the system is a central challenge for everyone’s practice, even though we all speak from different positions within the system, especially in terms of economic status, (dis)ability, race, or gender.

By appropriating the physical manifestations of this system and distilling them into platforms for artistic communication, we aim to foster critical reflection on these dynamics. With the engine and the warehouse shelves, we chose two entities which are usually hidden, but nevertheless part of the chain of action. Centering them within the display logic of an exhibition held a certain poetic power to us.

Interestingly, in the realization of the exhibition, our ways of working temporarily morphed into those of a company, delegating tasks, formulating clear outcomes, assigning responsibilities and managing concerns. However, these social and physical logistics of bringing together our artistic positions also made us aware that rationalized forms of execution are not a problem in themselves, when working towards a goal we all share.