Kenneth Dow, Ellwangen, 1992.
In his projects, Kenneth Dow navigates through a fictionalized world, heavily inspired by his own biography and present surroundings. His artistic work is concerned with strategies to make the absent, absentees, the invisible perceived, absent as in no longer present, invisible as in interiority.
Subjective states are made palpable through choice, combination and recursion of procedures, together forming a representation apparatus. The representation machine set in motion then conceives the work of art, as seen on display.
Kenneth Dow has studied in Milan, Hamburg and Shanghai and holds a MFA from Stuttgart Academy of Fine Art. In 2015, he was admitted to the German Academic Study Fund. He has participated in numerous institutional group shows, theatre and film Festivals.
Work at the collection: PsyCHO TRance // K-Hole
PsyCHO TRance // K-Hole, 2019.
The last few years have witnessed art spaces and clubs reaching out to each other, each seeking the others’ prestige, credibility and audience. It seems as if clubs as cultural spaces were able respond better to the current discourse in and around art than white cubes. In their very struggle for survival, art spaces are the spitting image of capitalist conformity. The white cube is capable of digesting even the most fierce critique, by separating it in time and space. In small portions it is made indigestible to the observer without poisoning the productive, working brain. It is sane. It allows for sober consideration, reflection. It allows the observer to remain in their position as body-less bystander, possibly a freecam. Like when you’ve been shot dead in Counter Strike and are waiting for a new game to start.
The club is its antithesis. Visitors may experience loss of their ego, but never their body. It denies its inhabitants space for observant reflection. The mere presence of the physical body makes it participant.
Possibly, this insistence on the body is what makes the club so appealing to the art world. Clubs are struggling to survive in coexistence with their neighborhoods. The interests of the working bourgeois in recreating their workforce is valued above a crowd spending their vital energies without feeding them back into the labor market. They are site to (chemically induced) psychosis, the broken body (mind) neither willing nor apt for wage labor. The ill are the strongest form of resistance. This observation coincides with the notion that the end of the world seems more likely than the end of neoliberalism. Rave hedonism read as auto aggression, really is aggression against the internalized disciplinary.
PsyCHO TRance // K-Hole is part of a research and production program held by Hangar in collaboration with the NewArtFoundation and the .BEEP { collection;}.
Special acknowledgments: Fabolous St. Pauli, Hamburg. Xīnchējiān 新车间, Shanghai
