Mess with Your Values
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
Curated by Marenka Krasomil
and Michaela Richter
03 March – 29 April 2018

The exhibition Mess with Your Values presents the wide range of themes and practices of eleven international artists who were awarded the Berlin Senate’s working scholarship for visual arts in 2017. Numerous video artworks, expansive installation and performative works, paintings, prints and photographs offer an insight into Berlin’s artistic diversity.

Mess with Your Values presents positions that deal with questions of the transformation of society, the encounter and exchange of different social groups, the recognition and equality of all genders as well as forms of historiography. In doing so, they question normative perspectives and use artistic means to deliberately create ruptures that can be experienced as spaces of possibility.

The title of the exhibition Mess with Your Values goes back to the music band Joy Division. In the song Candidate from their legendary album Unknown Pleasures, the band sings about rebelling against existing conditions and distancing oneself from repressive systems in a laconic and haunting post-punk manner.

The artists in the exhibition explore social images, territories and narratives with a wide variety of expressions and approaches. Mess with Your Values examines habitual patterns of thought and entrenched values for their pliability and blurriness. The deliberate blurring of boundaries and the creation of “disorder” serve as productive strategies that enable a reconsideration of community in an expressive, subversive and humorous way.