 A very, very warm welcome. Moin. Bonjour. I'm very pleased to see so many people here to our symposium today. What looks good today may not look good tomorrow. It's like a legacy of Michel Majeros. So in order, I'm Bettina Steinbrücker. I'm the director of this institution to introduce myself. And yes, when I thought about this, I mean, this event has a longer history. Because before I also came director of this place, I worked on a show in Hamburg. That is actually the opening this Friday on the Digital Majeros. My Milan Ter took over and is opening this show. And last Sunday was the 20th anniversary of his early passing. And the estate of Michel Majeros. And I say a very warm welcome to Ruth and Monica. We are here today. Tim Neuger will come a bit later. I guess he arrives at 10.25 with the airplane from Berlin. They started something very amazing. Because Michel Majeros is an artist who defined himself of being an artist, an international artist from Berlin. He was born in Esch-Alderset in Luxembourg. And he was amazingly early in what he did. And now 20 years later, with the effort of certain institutions and also the estate, there is a huge series of exhibitions exactly around this time. There is their big exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the KW, Neugierim Schneider, the NBK, and the ICA in Miami. Also, Stephanie Seidel will come later on, who curates the show in Miami. And they are also in about, I don't know, I saw a last wrong number, more than 10 institutions in Germany show his work in the collection display. So this is a moment to think about his work. And I think it's a very good moment. When I thought about it yesterday, I looked at the title of an interview but von der Heide, the director of Musaion in Bootsen, was doing FAMOUS Magazine. And the title of this interview is a performance artist who performed as a painter to deliver an object which was to perform as a painting. I think this summarizes it very well when we talk about Maceros. His legacy is really interesting. And as an art historian, legacy grows and also the information about an artist grows with distance. We need distance in order to understand what he's done during his lifetime. And the distance of 20 years is extremely productive. We have to, when we reconsidered when he was working, he was working at the beginning of information age. It's a turn of the millennium in an information society and in a world that drastically changed. And this world is still drastically changing. But imagine that time the smartphone wasn't... Yeah, the smartphone was there. Like this big thing, the computer was there. But that was it. It was the time before social media. And it was when everything was still cool. Because nowadays we also know about the backside of the digital, we know about the backside of social media. When Michel was working, everything was cool. It was a very optimistic time. And one looked positively at the changes of its time. When I look at this work today, it's really we can learn so much about it today. When we look at the iconography, what did he use? He used animation, he used branding, he used advertisement. When we look at the library he has, in this library there are all these books from early digital age. It's also, I think, Marshall McLoone is also in there. But all these books, I read it. I had it in my library as well. I actually gave them away because they're a bit dated nowadays. But it's interesting to think how everything changed and what we can do out of it today. He was also one of the only ones who really put performance into place, who combined performance and painting. And we asked ourselves, what was it at that time? I attended the opening of KW. It's a very amazing show about his early work. A very well-known artist came to me and we were talking in this exhibition and he told me, you know, at that time I didn't know what it was. I didn't understand his art because it was so different to everything else that was done at that time. And I think he was actually right when he told me so because it was completely different and there are some parts of his work we only understand today from this distance. We also understand Photoshop or we understand the sneakers. We look at it completely different. It was, for me, a future-oriented practice. It was the internet as a possibility. It was painting after Kippenberger but with his newest material, with different material, with brushstrokes, with a kind of playful idea of what it could mean. And he was building his own architecture. He was very important in installation art. So what we are doing today, when I started working on this topic, I was thinking that because coming from Berlin, there are most of the people also talking about Michel, are still the people who knew him. And the people who are very close to this whole scene and I was interested in the question, what happens if we discuss the work with a younger generation, with a generation that didn't meet Michel Margeros but with a distance, looks at his work and that is what we wanna do today. And we have a tight schedule. So we have, yeah, I have some, we have a couple of talks this morning. Clementine Probi is going to do the moderation of these talks and the introductions. And you have the schedule in the booklet. You received upon arrival in your bags. There will be three talks in the morning with a 15 minute break and a lunch break at 12.45. Two talks in the afternoon, which will lead to the final panel discussion. I'm moderating and conclusion remarks by Sam Tonson, the cultural minister of Luxembourg. Water, food, coffee will be available in the auditorium and there is a lunch offer at our vegan restaurant for a smaller price. We also, there's only one person we don't really introduce but I'm gonna do it now. I'm very happy that Motoko Ishibashi is here. Thank you for coming. She's a Japanese artist based in London. She studied at the Royal College of Art London at the Slade School of Fine Arts and that's a KU university in Tokyo. She focused predominantly on painting. Ishibashi's practice amalgamates Western and Japanese visual languages through painting. Performance, installation, video photography and printmaking. Engaging with mass consumer culture as well as digital cultures, her work considers relations of power, gender, the body and selfhood within technology mediated society. Ishibashi's work has appeared in exhibitions internationally and I'm very happy that we have her here because we decided we not only have talks and lectures but we also have performances because for us it's very important how artists feel about it. We also have the second artist is Corey Ark Angel. He's unfortunately a bit sick so he will come via soon, give his lecture via soon and will also participate in the panel via soon. So at the end I really have to thank, I have to thank the whole team of Samudam. I have to thank the estate very, very much for helping us so much and being such a good partner. I thank the board. I think also the government of Luxembourg for really supporting this big time. I thank the family of Michelle. They will come later today and join us at the end of this symposium. I thank Joel Vallabriga for organizing the performance and Clementine Probi who did everything. So thank you very much and I hand over to Clementine who will introduce our first speaker. Thank you very much for your attention. Good morning everyone. So welcome to Mudam for this symposium. I'm personally very excited about so I'm Clementine Probi. I'm assistant curator here at Mudam and I've been working alongside Bettina and Joel Vallabriga for the organization of this symposium. I'm also working on the organization and on the curation of the exhibition, Michelle Magiris, Zinn Machine that will take place at Mudam in March 2023. And today I will be introducing each speaker and I will also be walking around with the mic as well as the neighbor who's just there for the Q&A's after the talks. So please just give me a sign if you have a question or a comment. They will be very, very welcome. And finally, before I introduce Karin Archie our first speaker, I have to say that I'm very proud of the incredible panel that we have today that we put together. And I would also like to thank Bettina for having me by her side on the journey throughout Magiris's work and also to explore a bit more how his work resonates in the younger generation's minds. So now our first speaker is Karin Archie. She's curator of contemporary arts at Stadelic Museum in Amsterdam. She was formerly based in Berlin and in New York where she worked as an independent curator, as an editor and art critic, rating for art forum and freeze among other magazines. She has organized major exhibitions of artists, Hito Steyer, Rineke D'Axtra and Meta Havan, as well as major group exhibitions. She heads the Stadelic's research initiative on the acquisition, conservation and display of time-based media. And I leave the floor to you, Karin. Good morning, everyone. It's super nice to be here. Yeah, I just wanted to thank Mudam, Clementine, Bettina for inviting me and also the estate also for their support and my research on Magiros. So yeah, I wanted to also start by saying that I think it's really interesting that the panel that we have here today hasn't actually met the artist. And I think that that's really kind of special in a contemporary context. And I'm really excited for today to hear more from Fabian and Ingrid and Sarah Johanna to hear their thoughts on Magiros' work. And I also was just talking to Fabian actually about how our experience of Magiros' work has been marked by the fact that living in Berlin, there are a lot of opportunities to see his work, but we're always kind of interested in a greater contextualization of it and thinking through what this work does, what it was doing at the turn of the millennium when he was at the height of his career and then also what it's doing today. Yeah, so I think that for me what, you know, in terms of my research on Magiros in the last couple of years, I think that one can read his work aesthetically. My first impressions of the work were like, okay, this is someone who's kind of pushing, painting, kind of influenced by artists like Rauschenberg towards a more contemporary standpoint, bringing in various kinds of collage and different material, but getting to know him as a person through my research has been really, really interesting. I was super interested at first to learn that he was a student of the conceptual artist, Josef Kosuth, and I initially had a kind of hard time squaring what his work looks like with the legacy of Kosuth as a conceptual artist, especially because Magiros is such a painter's painter making discreet objects. And this is of course something that, this is not necessarily a square with the history of conceptual art sinking through the anti-aesthetic and also the decommodification of contemporary art. In a lot of literature he's kind of described as not necessarily being a conceptual practitioner interested in theory. And I really, so my thoughts through this research have really evolved since then and I think that you can see the trace of a lot of conceptual methodologies that are very present in his work. And I would differentiate, I think it's really important to think through the fact that maybe Magiros was not necessarily interested in theory or theoretical precepts, but he was a keen student of history. And I think that that's a really interesting entrance point to his work because these things are so bound up within each other. I think also on a personal level what I found really interesting to learn about Magiros was that he had a proclivity for the newest technology. I heard that he would kind of carry around a Zach Morris style brick cell phone and lug around a laptop and he was a very avid gamer, also quite introverted, not necessarily a partier like someone like Kippenberger. And he was also a collector of things. So he would collect techno party flyers, newspaper clippings, various art books, advertisements, packing material. And when I visited the estate last year and I could peek at his bookshelf I found the art historical company that he kept very telling. So he was, I saw a lot of these books on Fragonard and Warhol and Kandinsky and Michelangelo. And so I think that it's interesting that he kind of positioned himself also in his work by sampling these artists into this canon of extremely recognized male painters. At the same time, I find it really interesting that his work could reference a Kandinsky but then also have basically be based on a Washington detergent advertising or packaging at the same time. And I'll talk a little bit more about this book, Aquarale later. But yeah, so there's a very, very concerted juxtaposition of the high and the low in his work. And his proclivity for collecting and sampling from his collection is really, I think, characteristic of this turn of millennium period. So I think of this in this generation in terms of techno and techno's proclivity for musical sampling and other digital production techniques. And so this is very characteristic of the fact that in this moment, you didn't have to kind of shuffle through records to find a certain musical sample but you could do that digitally. So yeah, this is something that I think is evidenced by techno fliers. This is also, I would think that you could actually find this graphic from this Trésor poster in his work. So I just wanna zoom out a minute and say that I'm really glad that we're having this conference because I think that the writing existing, at least in English, on Majerys' work needs to be updated. So through the kind of research that I have done, I think that the internet in these works and as Majerys was a very, very keen user of new technologies, they were kind of romantically described. So at the time of his death in 2002, the internet was just kind of a kernel of what it was today. So all of the corporatized social networking platforms like YouTube and Facebook hadn't yet existed and user-generated sites like GeoCities still dominated the web, so popular narratives about the internet cast it as a chaotic and unregulated and undefine and dangerous space and the writing on Majerys' work from that period really suffered, I think, from that romanticization of technology. So I'm not going to name names, but I wanted to share this quote with you. Similar to photography one and a half centuries earlier, the primary impact of these new technologies was mental, inspiring new approaches to subject and composition. The basic composition of Majerys' works was determined by the tools of the computer, by copy and paste, and the strong presence of the form of the computer script. His iconographic portfolio was response to the extreme profusion of chaos that we enter when surfing the internet to the ready availability of forms and symbols it offers into a cultural universe where old hierarchies have collapsed. So I think this is like a very un-chill way to describe the internet and also Majerys' work and isn't really in line with a society that has seen the rapid development of technology and industrialization and globalization and in comparison, these things are not described in those terms. So I also think that we can include the exact opposite from what is stated in this quote, which is that the internet is actually the most sophisticated kind of culmination of human knowledge and the best organized culmination of human knowledge in the history of the world. And similarly, Majerys' work represents a very, very refined practice of sampling, collecting, filtering and composing with a lot of control and intention. So it's not chaos, it's actually something that's much more refined. So yeah, Majerys was of course Luxembourgian but he lived for many years in Berlin and his notebooks contextualized his own work against the backdrop of German painting. So I'm not gonna say necessarily what German painting conjures for most people but I have just put a key for painting on the side here. But in the 1990s, of course, the scene in Düsseldorf and Cologne were known around the art world as a kind of breeding ground for new ideas about art and particularly painting and characters like Kippenberger dominated the scene which are very, in terms of his personality and Kippenberger's known as a big partier, I've heard that Majerys was very much not like that. But in terms of Kippenberger in an interview with Yodakuta in 1990, he said, simply to hang a painting on the wall and to say it's art is dreadful. The whole network is important, even Spagatini. When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery, that's also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls. And so you can sense in this quote from Kippenberger, this is emblematic of a lot of artists from the 1980s that he had stakes in resting painting from its status as a dead medium or a boring medium or a too easy medium. And this is, of course, after decades of conceptual art pushing the dominant narrative of art history towards the anti-aesthetic and towards anti-commodity practices. So it was difficult at the time to reconcile painting as having any sort of conceptual apparatus surrounding it. So when I was researching Majerys, I was really trying to understand the methodology behind his practice and I inevitably came back again and again to this essay painting beside itself by David Joslit, which was written in 2009. And even though that was seven years after the kind of funny anonymous quote about the chaotic internet that I used earlier, he does still kind of admittedly hammer on about the unfathomability of the internet as a network, but in a more interesting framework that connects together painting the internet and conceptual practices. To Joslit, the internet is a modern day sublime that is exemplified in the works by Kippenberger and Krutja. And from the essay by Joslit, he says, it's worth pausing to consider how difficult it is to visualize networks, which in their incomprehensible scale, ranging from the impossibly small microchip to the impossibility of the vastly global internet, they truly embody the contemporary sublime. And then Kippenberger's quote that painting belongs in a network to include everything from the architecture and the walls to the spaghetti, highlights that the rehabilitation of painting again, from its hyper commodifiable state to conceptual form, dependent on contextual and environmental frameworks, was a shared project of the painters of this era. And then to place Majeros in this, he was born over a decade after Kippenberger and then almost a decade after Krutja, and he saw himself as part of a younger generation pushing forward painting in new directions, working more critically with scale, architectural context, and a more democratized selection of source material as well as proto-digital production practices. And if we were to consider Majeros's work in the context of Joslitz thinking on painting in an expanded network, it would be opportune to question so then what are the networks that Majeros's works envision. So I think that if Majeros's works envisions a network, it is really that of painting itself, its history, its institutions, its architectural container, its relationship to viewing experience and commodification, and I'll discuss some specific works that highlight this shortly. So the disruption of convention was one way in which Majeros sought to do this, and I don't know if I'll state this entire title, but so the disruption of these conventions include blowing up the scale of his work to absurd proportions or introducing disruptive architectural elements in the gallery using absurdly long titles, copying other artists' work in his own work, selling drawings from a spool of drawing paper in his own exhibition, introducing non-art elements into his work, and this is an example of an absurdly long title here. This particular case of construction in as much as a key image, as it almost didactically announces the irrational spatial structure, namely contradicting the usual spatial rationality of the following abstract image. As you can see, it's difficult to print this in a PowerPoint, I can't imagine what that's like for a book designer or a wall text, but I think that it speaks to his kind of cheekiness and kind of pushing these things farther and farther. So Majeros' first solo exhibition was at Neukrem Schneider in Berlin in 1994, and I think that this exhibition already laid the groundwork for his thinking in terms of scale, high and low sampling, and art historical citation. In the show combined paintings on canvas with wall-filling installations in a range of styles, you can see influences from Basquiat's, Albert Eilen, Georg Baselitz, as well as cartoons such as Busybear, and this is actually a blown-up Roger Rabbit comic, and you can see on the top it says Enlargio Ray Arm, and then this kind of seems to hint at his thoughts on the scale, creating a very wall-sized, large painting, and then there's a tiny little, you can see this tiny little canvas in the lower right that says, too big, better turn off. So it's like, I think Roger Rabbit found this kind of enlarger ray machine, and then it's kind of, I think, a comment on his own work, and of course the title of the exhibition is Gemildo or Painting, so he's very much, I think, self-reflective in terms of his relationship to painting itself. And in this exhibition, he also installed a thick layer of asphalt in the gallery, which I find super interesting because it was thick enough that it kind of made you trip. When you came into the gallery, unless you were very careful, and he also painted the kind of road stripes onto the asphalt. And then alongside the wall paintings and works on canvas, he placed a large rolled-up scroll of ink drawings depicting Looney Tunes characters like Wiley, Coyote, and Roadrunner, and he traced various scenes from Looney Tunes' episode. So the way in which the scroll worked was in a kind of almost slide, like a time-based fashion, almost like a film strip. And visitors were able to buy these works in one meter sections at an affordable price. So I think this also speaks to the fact that he wanted to democratize who drawing is for, what can it depict, who can buy it, how do you buy it? And I believe this might even be shown at the new Neue Grimmischenheide exhibition this year. So two years later in 96, Meijers's first major institutional solo exhibition was held at Kunsthalle Basel. And have you guys been to Kunsthalle Basel? Yeah, yeah. If you've ever been to this space, you'll know that it's like super fancy-looking and it's like very, very decorative and ornate. It's a neoclassical building. And so I think Myero has came into that and he's like, how the hell am I gonna deal with this space? You can see, yeah, and like the ceiling and everything, all of this kind of ornate architecture. And so he disrupted this by putting in a metal scaffolding floor. And so I find that interesting also after this asphalt floor that he's bringing in these kind of like street construction materials. And it's rumored that when you step on this floor, it would creak. And then if you were wearing a heel, you would fall through the holes in the floor. So I think this is another one of these kind of cheeky gestures that he's making. And of course, he's bringing these outside materials, these street materials into the gallery. So then also the scale of these paintings is enormous. So I think that this one, Katze, is 714 by 966 centimeters. And then I think it's super interesting that he's again juxtaposing comics. And in other paintings in this exhibition, there were also kind of like corporate logos that he'd stripped down. And then there are these super like sweet scenes of a cat looking at a boot filled with sweets. And then there's also some kind of uncanny weird moments like the same comics from the Busy Bear. Like you can see on the top right corner. Yeah, no, top left corner, that the birds from this painting, like this blue bird in the kind of top right corner, is also in this picture of Isis Build. And then he also had this impetus to kind of white it out and strike it out. And then there's also, I learned from the estate, a reference to rolled up Frank Stella paintings. So I think that this is really interesting also in terms of thinking through, what does it mean to cross out in painting? What does it mean to work with white? Can this be a reference to Rhyman, for example? Is this a reference to painting itself? And so I wanted to introduce this idea of the dead suckers. So even though he may not be supposedly theoretically or conceptually motivated all the time, he was this keen student of the history of painting. And he's always writing about the kind of canonized great painters and his notebooks and his relationship to them. And so the art historian and curator Brigitte Hansen writes about how he's coined this term, dead suckers, for these paintings. And she writes, a conceptual metaphor he uses for artists who interest him as dead suckers, both in paintings as well as the notebooks. And she quotes his notebook, the best way to explain that a few things that look like Baselitz, Aylen, Warhol, Basquiat, Stella is that it doesn't matter what the painting is if the attitude that you have toward painting works, then the paintings work too. Dead suckers, so what? Everybody dies and everything stays. So I think that this quote is really interesting because it also points to the artist's attitude in terms of defining artistic material. So everyone dies, everything stays, everything can be used, recycled and sampled. So it's not any kind of surprise that Majeros brings together the high and low, specifically art historical citation with comics, advertisement, corporate logos and these kinds of things. And this I would just kind of highlight, I think is very, very new because if you look at the history of Pop, for example, Pop was only bringing below, like comics, to a high art form and making very discrete works from them, so if you look at Rauschenberg, for example, he would blow up a comic but then he would create a painting that existed as a discrete object in a market. So I wanted to talk about a few public projects. April, which I showed before, is a really monumental work. It's about 10 by 10 meters. It's a painting on cotton commissioned by Könsperheim in Hamburg and the institution had commissioned various artists to create works for this kind of glassed in facade that I'll show in another slide. And the title, Aquarelle, references Koninsky's first watercolor. I'm not going to try to pronounce that because I don't speak French. But it's from 1913 and it's thought to be the first abstract watercolor in art history. But then Majeros actually found a nachfühlpack, which is like a refill pack for laundry detergent and he thought that it looked quite a lot like the Aquarelle. So he decided to scan this. He decided to scan this nachfühlpack and superimpose it in Photoshop and create a composition in a photo editing program. And the exact production details of this are unknown, but I would speculate that he would print out this composition divided into I believe 42 parts and create a miniature and then he would either project that miniature and trace it or he would paint this by hand. So there would be these smaller canvases that he would bring from a studio to an exhibition space that's of course much larger than his studio and then see them for the first time actually altogether as one work. So he was such a master craftsman that this really worked for him. He was also a very good draftsman. So I mean, I can't imagine doing that just kind of almost working blind, but this is something that he was very, very adept at doing, creating these kind of scale models that would be first seen in the exhibition space. The other thing that I find really interesting about Aquarelle is that he had been bringing the outside in so he was bringing in asphalt and construction scaffolding and stuff like this, but this work actually brings painting out. So this is like a 10 meter large piece and then as you can see, this is viewable from the street from quite far away. So this is a ship that I think is happening around 1998 where he starts making more public projects. So I wanted to talk about a couple other public projects that were completed in 1998. So this is a billboard titled HILFA and it was commissioned on the 100 year anniversary of secession in Vienna. And for this work, he referenced or sampled Andy Warhol's camouflage series and then he embedded HILFA into the composition of the work as this kind of shrek hand pops out from the canvas. And I think that there's an interesting paradox to the gesture of using a communication platform like a billboard. Like this is the, in terms of advertising, this is a format where you wanna be as clear as possible and you wanna communicate as quickly as possible and he's embedding that into a sort of, well camouflage literally, so the legibility of the word HILFA, which is of course a kind of cry for help, is not really easily able to be seen. So I think that it's also kind of creating the stumbling block for the viewer where you have to really look pensively to understand what's going on. And once you understand that the word HILFA is there, it's I think quite easy to see it. This is also a work that was in the Munich Central Station called Beschleunigung and it's a kind of, you can see, I think that this work is very curious because it brings together things that, elements that I find to be quite alienated from each other. So there's this kind of weird photo calibration object, like this green and white thing and then also these kind of spheres that look like almost advertising elements and this kind of pink racetrack, which could almost be like a techno flyer-inspired form. So I was interested in how, in the context of a train station where it's kind of a sloppy public space where like everything comes together in a very ad hoc way, how he's kind of adding to this, like yeah, this kind of like a very loose and tactical relationship. To the train station and to the works themselves. And then this was a project that actually happened in Luxembourg from Manifesta II also in 1998. This is also another cheekly long title, yet sometimes what is read successfully stops us with its meeting, number two. And it was an installation at Utopolis Cinema and I believe the concession stand where you can buy Coca-Cola and popcorn. And I think that this is also, it's really interesting to highlight his conceptual thinking with this work because he's attempting to update the context of painting with the kind of context of advertising culture and come out of vacation and this is like, this is like, I think it's really amazing that there's this Nike shoe that's an artwork but then it's existing next to a Coca-Cola poster very, very seamlessly. So I think that this is also, I mean, I'm sure as a curator if I ever asked a artist to install next to this day to look cafe, they would kill me. They would be like, no, I'm like totally not. I'm not doing that, but I think it's super interesting that my arrow is probably actually really appreciated this space and yeah, I just find it very, very special. Yeah, so I find that, like so I wanted to end with a work that was one of Majeros's last pieces and I think that it signals a shift happening in his practice for, so this is a work from 2002 and this I think was building on the fact that he'd become known for doing these project, public projects from 1998. And for this work, Sozial Palast, Majeros was invited to create a piece that covers the scaffolding of the Brandenburg Gate because it was under renovation at the time. And he chose to print the scaffolding cover with an image of the Palaceum social housing development in Berlin-Schunabag. So this has a very, very concerted social and historical significance, which I will just talk more about. So the Palaceum is a post-war brutalist platenbau. It contains over 500 apartments and it's built around and over the Hochbunker Palastrasse which is a Nazi-era bunker that was built with forced labor from 1943 to 1945. And the street is named itself after the Bellina Sport Palast, which is a massive event hall, or was a massive event hall capable of hosting 10,000 people. And so it used to occupy these grounds and it was torn down in 1973 in order to make room for this social housing project. And the Bellina Sport Palast is famous for hosting Nazi leader Josef Gerber's speech calling for total war, which is just burned into German cultural memory. Yeah, he said, Wolde den totalen Krieg, do you want total war? The total war is the shortest war. And so the platenbau in Berlin is also kind of a very banal site. They're all over Berlin, they're all over the East. This is in the areas in Europe that were bombed in the Second World War, this was a very quick and easy to build form of architecture, kind of known as a utopian architecture that popped up like mushrooms in the decades following the war. And the reality that came in the subsequent years following the erection of such buildings is that these are actually quite difficult to live in. They're not very utopian at all. Actually, it's quite the opposite and the high population density and the current conditions are actually known to engender crime. So this is also the case with Proud Aigo in St. Louis, Cabrini Green in Chicago, and also the Belmourmere in Amsterdam, which is actually where I live today. Yeah, so even though my arrows may not have many very overtly political works, I can't see this as being anything but extremely socially and politically motivated and I'm really fascinated by this work. I'm really fascinated by what could have come after this work had he been able to live. And I think that super imposing the image of a highly socially significant building like the Palaceum, this brings to mind the nation's Germany's past failures, specifically its history of xenophobia and genocide onto the city's kind of architectural crown jewel of the Brandenburg Gate. And so yeah, I would be, it's of course just an enduring kind of tragedy that we weren't able to see what the artist had in store after this, after these works. So yeah, I wanted to kind of just wrap up by saying that I think at its core, thinking through his networks, Mayeris' work examines the practice and histories of painting in the context of his social and historical moment. This includes the practice of technological, rather than analog sampling, as well as expanding the practice of painting beyond its canvas into the world, which also points towards societal innovations, social needs, and more. So thank you very much. That was my talk. Thank you, Karen. Maybe if you can stay a little bit for the Q&A. We don't have much time. We're running a bit late, but maybe I can start with a question. Thank you so much for this great talk. I was wondering, in your talk, if you mention how Yoselit talks about the internet as a contemporary sublime because of its overwhelming vastness, and you also mentioned this romanticization of technology. And I think at the time that Mayeris was active, the internet was very much a utopian place of opportunities and non-hierarchical relations. And I was wondering if you could identify this kind of utopian motive linked to the, or like utopian vision of the internet in the work of Mayeris and how it manifests, if it does. That's an interesting question because my first response to that is to think about how difficult access was to the internet during this period because I'm 37, so I'm not like, I'm kind of a born digital person, but I remember on my live journal or MySpace or GeoCities, you really had to know code. And so that is something that actually was not very democratic. It was very, there was a high level of entrance in terms of being able to access that. What I get the impression from Mayeris is that he had an obsession with thinking through newness and he had an obsession thinking through this kind of painting art history, like Baselitz, Kettenmerga, and kind of figuring out the puzzle of working around that and through that and with that history, but then pushing it forward. So I think that he was always looking towards new options for working, like scanning, projecting, also digital note taking. I think it's speculated that he switched from working on notebooks to working, taking notes on his laptop, maybe around 99, I guess Ruth would know more about that. And then, yeah, I think that the utopianism and the freedom that comes in that is that I think that he felt quite unburdened to use any material that he wanted and to juxtapose it in any way that he wanted. And I see a huge amount of freedom in how he worked in his studio and how prolific he was. So yeah, I guess that's what my answer would be to that. And he had a very, I think, positive relationship to technology where the quote that I read before, it was actually Nicholas Bourriot, who I respect enormously, but I find that quote really, it just didn't age well. Where did we go? This is like the opposite of the scrolling that I'm used to. You know when that happens, when you go up? Oh no, okay, here we go. But yeah, I don't think that Majira has necessarily felt that way. We're like, everything's chaos. I think that he, I mean, my speculation is that he actually felt a lot of freedom in being able to pull from anything that he wanted to and didn't feel limited by that. He just saw opportunity in all of these things. Okay, thank you. Is there any question in the audience? Yes. So thank you for your presentation. You spoke about discrete objects. You said that he worked with discrete objects and then you spoke as paintings, as discrete objects. I didn't understand what were discrete objects. Yeah, so that's a great question because I could definitely explain that a little bit more. So if you look at someone like Kossuth or a lot of the, so my specialty is institutional critique or one of them. And then within that rubric, a lot of the artists from that generation, 60s, 70s, were thinking about how to make art more experiential and not necessarily something that you buy on a market and that's it. And so trying to make work a cognitive conceptual experience rather than just purely an aesthetic experience. And that would be to kind of build on the history started by Duchamp with conceptual art and the ready made and not bringing in extra visual material that was spectral. So it was like a kind of anti visual art in a way. And so Kossuth is one of the main players in thinking through conceptual art and its status as a commodity. And it's interesting to see how Majiros is really making paintings. Like these are in discrete object, I mean by it's like something that can be put on a wall and sold and I don't have anything against that but given his tutelage, it's something that is curious. Like how do these things fit in together? And I think that he moved past that thinking through discrete objects by making installations like this. And also thinking through like, oh, okay, I'm bringing the outside in. I'm referencing outdoor space, the kind of politics of the streets and then also within the Kunsthauter Basel exhibition making the aesthetic experience also something that engaged the body by creating this floor and creating a kind of phenomenological experience that was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in a way. And in relation to that, would you say that everything you talked about and this use of discrete objects, would you say this was a kind of critique of painting and it's like kind of maybe somehow complicit links with the commercial world? I think that he, I mean, my just reading his notebooks, I think that he saw it as a puzzle to kind of like how do you push through this history and how do you relate to your kind of predecessors but then also build upon it? And I guess you could see that as a critique but you could also see it as a deep love and I guess the act of critique itself is holding accountable something that you love. So in that sense, yes, I think that he definitely was interested in a kind of sense of critique to some extent. Thanks, that's a great answer. Okay, thank you so much. Any other question? So I will then introduce our next speaker. Thank you.