January 11 – March 3, 2013.
Kit Schulte Contemporary Art Berlin | Curated by Kit Schulte & Agnes Hoffmann.

This group exhibition celebrates the art of fantastic and delusional ideas. Natascha Stellmach hit the headlines in 2008 when she invited the public to join her in smoking the ashes of Kurt Cobain, which resulted in a massive media response. This evoked a dramatic reaction from the public (what we’d now call a ‘shit storm’), to the extent of sending the artist death threats.

This spurred Stellmach on to further examine what this invitation meant, both to the public and herself – and the Threat series is one of these outcomes. For the Threats, Stellmach chose a small, yet broad selection of the vitriolic responses (others appear in her artist book, “Rape Me”) to illustrate the project’s global impact – from Finland to Australia. She then edited and created text collages from art magazine advertising, inspired by the punk aesthetic of artists such as Jamie Reid. In an attempt to transform the works further – from disturbing to playful – she wore each of these collages for a period of weeks (eating, working, sleeping, having sex with etc) and even lost one on the street, one drunken evening, only to find it again. Stellmach then transformed them further by scanning, re-touching and printing the works on a soft rag paper, to then frame each work in her signature red. The six Threats are a glimpse at the absurdity and extremes of human nature, but also the power of transformation.

Artists: Jörg Bong, João Galrão, Volker März, Sandra Munzel, Joan Ryan, Natascha Stellmach, Deborah Wargon & Christopher Winter

SELECTED PRESS
Der Tagesspiegel | Schauerstunde – Review by Vinzenz Weidner (Deutsch)

See WORKS for more information.