Stranger to Myself

Solo Exhibiton at Drawing Room Hamburg, 2017 Art Berlin Fair for Modern and Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2017

Caps can function as an interface between a commercialized, globally produced uniformity of goods, the advertising of large brands, and as a symbol for the most diverse subversive variants of appropriation, with which diverse identities can be constructed and communicated. All Cap works deal with variants of the statement “Stranger to Myself”, with which Tischer refers to the book “We are strangers to ourselves” by the psychoanalyst and literary theorist Julia Kristeva. In it, Kristeva pleads for dealing with the stranger that is based on an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable within ourselves.
In Jenni Tischer’s current work, various social dynamics can be heard that weave threads between art, fashion, identity and personality. The grid is negotiated in the sculptures and displays in modular wooden structures, thread weaves and textile quilts as a symbolic form for the ongoing process of rationalization in the private, intimate and public spheres of capitalist society. Statistics, whose function is to make things appear necessary and objective and to convert individual data into universal laws, thus reproduce social structures of violence and discrimination. The exhibition can therefore be understood as a reflection and negotiation of one’s own involvement in the (re)production of existing conditions as well as the other way around

Sources:
Julia Kristeva „Fremde sind wir uns selbst“, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1990
Samo Tomšič „The Capitalist Unconscious”, Verso Books, London New York, 2015
Justin Joque “Revolutionary Mathematics. Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism” Verso Books London New York, 2022

Thanks to: Teddy Glickman and Mizuki Todoroki