Claudia Reiche

Installation (flag, LED ticker)

STWST upstairs
Part of exhibition: open throughout

New Jokes is dedicated to the foggy zone of media and reality. It is made representable with the figure of the clown.
A clown is funny in the circus ring. But what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight, and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?
In the cultural imagination, the clown increasingly tends towards the horror clown, which has become iconic as an anonymous thing of murderous violence, performed under large-mouthed, laughing masks.
The classical antinomy of the liar “I'm lying” has become “I'm joking” with large-scale tests on belief and disbelief in the game of post-truth.
Attempts to justify such acts of violence, patriarchal, racist etc. instrumentalize clown in partisanship against universal emancipation movements. The redeeming quality of the wild clown has been lost in the media ‘fog of war’ of our present.
4chan/b/ - Random, The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

My manifesto “FUNNYSORRYANGRYANONYMOUS. Clowns” is about this and acts as a fool. https://culturmag.de/litmag/claudia-reiche/99963 and http://17.manifestos.de/#clowns

Claudia Reiche is an artist, media scientist and curator. https://claudia-reiche.net
She works on cultures of the digital and is involved in projects that trace the boundaries between art and science, such as thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor. Bremen https://www.thealit.de. She has been teaching theory and art for many years and publishes on questions of mediality in the fields of psychoanalysis, film, visual cultures and queer culture.