Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick
Curated by Richard Julin in dialogue with Hendrik Folkerts
Accelerator, Stockholm University, Stockholm
17 May – 15 September 2024

Accelerator presents CHEAP: Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick. CHEAP is a Berlin-based art collective with the following long-time members: artist and performer Vaginal Davis, translator Daniel Hendrickson, actor and artist Susanne Sachsse and academic Marc Siegel.

CHEAP’s work materialises as performances, videos, festivals, concerts, talk shows, installations and radio programmes. In any format, their practice combines theory and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and sex. The exhibition title is inspired by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s article, “Learning from the Virus” (Artforum, June 2020). CHEAP says, “choose mutation. Don’t wait for it to choose you.”

Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick is an exhibition at Accelerator that features a new video presented on a silver-leafed, motorised billboard with a site-specific surround sound. The sound and image installation is accompanied by nine larger-than-life-sized black and white photographs by Annette Frick with portraits of CHEAP from some of their earliest projects, including CHEAP Klub.

The exhibition culminates in the performance Original Sin performed live at Accelerator on September 14 by Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo). Tickets for the performance will be sold via Moderna Museet (more info TBA).

The experimental video Choose Mutation combines found and original footage in a propaganda-like, dystopian collage about paranoia and the effects of social and political control on language and the body. With a layered soundtrack that includes text and lyrics by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel, found sounds and original music by Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart); the moving image work treats sound as code, text as images and vice versa.

Annette Frick, Susanne, 2002/2024; Inkjet print on Tecco matt paper; 199 × 141 cm; Susanne (Tiermaske), 2002/2024; Inkjet print on Tecco matt paper; 199 × 142 cm ; view installation

Annette Frick, Vaginal (Juanita Castro), 2001/2024; Inkjet print on Tecco matt paper; tbc: 199 × 138 cm; Vaginal (Garderobe), 2002/2024, Inkjet print on Tecco matt paper, 199 × 138 cm

Photo by:  Jean-Baptiste Béranger