HARDCORE GLAMOUR

Berlin is rough and dirty, constantly crashing into its own boundaries and celebrating a kind of glamour that doesn’t have much in common with what the term usually stands for. With volatile, sweaty attitude, the dreamt-to-death clichés of sixties New York are reanimated by simple means, until the real New Yorkers add themselves to the mix. Eventually, nobody knows who’s imitating whom anymore and they all start to believe in this mirage of the alleged metropolis, the way it is portrayed in magazines—at least until everybody is sober again.

However, in rare reflected moments the glamour of the new Berlin—which is hardcore, because it has no other option—can reveal itself as a survival strategy developed by those trying to evade from the maelstrom of brutal provincialism and cosmopolitan daydreaming, all the while knowing that they can’t ever entirely escape it. This strategy is a balancing act between conscious critique and a less conscious celebration of what already is here and what could potentially be.

With HARDCORE GLAMOUR, Niels Betori Diehl and Barbara K. Prokop try to grasp this feeling by connecting art practice and performative exhibition-making. With contributions from different artist positions, a multifaceted statement on Berlin is set up in which past and present are reconsidered and new possibilities are conceived. Thematically and emotionally bound to Berlin, HARDCORE GLAMOUR is produced in collaboration with basso, Ivan Boskovic, Chrysler Deutschland, Cookies, Grand Hyatt Berlin, Friederike Hamann, Moritz Hirsch, Daniel Keller, Heinz Peter Knes, Nik Kosmas, Malte Lochstedt, Marzahn-Wear, Möbel-Olfe, Departmentstore Quartier 206, Angie Reed, Sabine Reinfeld, seeDS.management, Pola Sieverding, Ulrich Urban, Christine Woditschka and Rommelo Yu.

One could understand HARDCORE GLAMOUR as a reportage from the grey zones between global subcultures and local mainstream, pervaded by a certain glamorising gaze and brought into being using diverse, often mimetic and appropriative strategies. Ambiguities and contradictions emerge from the exhibited works and performances—or from their interaction and dialogue—exposing the political moment of the exhibition, which relies on posing questions rather than on providing answers.

Consequently, HARDCORE GLAMOUR understands itself not merely as a counter-proposal to the superficiality and the mannerisms of market-compatible and slick art products from the age of the boom, but also questions a predominant, simplistic and leftist-conservative logic of boycott that reduces the political to either/or patterns. In this sense HARDCORE GLAMOUR stands for a militant way of being sexy.

Press release of the exhibition
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin
April-July 2007