CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI - JUGGLING THE STANDARDS OF REALITY

’dedonderdagen’, a one-day event that takes place several times a year, occupying the whole of building of International Arts Centre deSingel in Antwerp, acts a platform for open debate between artists and public, as well as a collective exploration and artistic encyclopaedia. For the 28.10 edition, argos composed a programma of three video’s by Berlin visual artist Christian Jankowski.

Jankowski is concerned with the tense triad of artist, work and audience. This concern is crystallized in playful work, not devoid of humour, commenting on the contemporary art world, which is ruled by entertainment in the same way as society. He keeps juggling the standards of reality. In the selected videos he works on a strategy to infiltrate into television in person, a populist medium which is a complete stranger to art. In Telemistica he rings up television fortune-tellers, a popular phenomenon in Italy, to find out his future during their live broadcast. The Holy Artwork focuses on the collaboration with a television evangelist. Jankowski has the notion of what a perfect contemporary artwork might be to him expressed through the words of the priest inviting him in the broadcast to lie down in front of the pulpit. In Talk Athens (picture) he is the guest of a popular Greek talk show, devoted to his own work and animated by the local Goedele Liekens. The artist, who does not understand a word of Greek, stubbornly keeps silent and keeps changing positions in the television studio. In his role-play he considers art as a free play area, a domain involving the possibility of transformation. And as a result his work is situated along various borderline areas, e.g. between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. By showing these videos on Thursdays on the fixed screens, mounted on video arms in various places in deSingel, the work of Jankowski is appropriately extended contextually and with regards to the way of presentation.