My reservations are temporary dispelled when I enter Kunst-Werke, and is confronted with Alfredo Jaar’s piece in the lobby, May 1st, 2011 (2011). One half of this photographic diptych, presents the instantly iconic picture of Barack Obama, flanked by the most powerful men and women in the U.S., watching the country’s elite soldiers assassinate Osama Bin Laden via a real-time video-link to the White House Situation Room. Alongside it hangs a completely blank screen, compelling us to mistrust pictorial representations, especially ones produced as political propaganda. From the entrance, you are led into the venues temporally darkened main space. As your eyes slowly adjust to the dim lighting conditions, shapes start to emerge from the shadows. With the picture from the White House Situation Room still on my retina, a series cage-like structures placed on an angle in the gallery evoke visions from the ten years between the 9/11 attacks and the killing of the self-proclaimed mastermind behind that operation; from Guantánamo Bay detention camp to the Abu Ghraib prison. What I first perceived to be cages is in reality a model of a truck designed based on the satellite photo that the former Secretary of State, Colin Powel, presented to the U.N. security council in 2003, as proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. “Proof” that soon thereafter led to the invasion of the country. But neither Saddam Hussein’s regime nor Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Phantom Truck (2007) features any weapons of mass destruction, only the haunting realization that one can see ghosts everywhere, if you are looking for them.

This ground-level installation is outstanding but the show loses momentum across the following three floors which are packed to tightly with a plethora of works. The first includes a few excellent pieces, from to Khaled Hourani’s postcards, The Zebra Copy Card (2009), showing two donkey’s painted as Zebras in a small zoo in Gaza Strip, photographed by the animal keepers on behalf of the Ramallah-based artist, as an absurd souvenir from an equally preposterous Palestinian situation, over Sean Snyder’s Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars (2004/05), a meditative video essay about the consumption of images and goods in ideological wars, to Abbas Akhavan’s Makeshift Objects (2008-present), for which the artist has turned everyday items into deadly weapons. On the upper floors, Paul Chan’s Re: The_Operation (2002), stands out. Created prior to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, this half-hour long video puts caricatures of the members of the Bush administration in the line of fire. Here they are portrayed as wounded soldiers or low-ranking officers struggling to make sense of a conflict that they haven’t chosen to be part of. Finally, the last floor has turned into a small cinema for the purpose of showing the now 84-year old Kenneth Angers’ Uniform Attraction (2008).  The film takes a satirical look at how costumes not only change our self-perception but ultimately our actions. Combining exceedingly patriotic U.S. Marine recruitment commercials, which are usually screened in theaters before action movies geared at teenage boys, and his own footage of adolescent men mimicking military men, it is campy to the point of being hilarious.

The individual artworks set aside, Seeing is believing, does not hold together as one exhibition. The abundance of works points in too many different directions which waters the individual pieces down. I trace this back to the curator’s statement, were she wasn’t precise enough when defining the thesis of her exhibition, resulting in a over confidence that the combination of works would create the synthesis she wasn’t able to articulate in writing. It is only when the works are allowed to breathe, like on the main and top floor, that they realize their full potential, as individual pieces and in relation to the theme of the show.  Ultimately, it doesn’t change the fact that this is one of the better shows in Berlin this season, and one of the better Kunst-Werke has organized in recent years.

Last summer, I spent a couple of months on a small barren rock off the far Eastern edge of the North American continent, Fogo Island. My ambition coming to the island was to find time to read, write, and prepare for an upcoming exhibition with my collaborator, Canadian curator Aileen Burns. Hiking, fishing, iceberg sightseeing, and whale watching were extra treats. Together with American artist David Kelley, German artist Silke Otto-Knapp, and British artist Hannah Rickards, Burns and I soon realized that by coming there, we had become involved in a social and economical experiment. A rather troublesome and quite exciting experience all together. Until recently the salty waters surrounding Fogo Island were teeming with cod once made European fishermen make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic Ocean. For almost three centuries, the cod fisheries were a resource for fishermen from Great Britain, the Caribbean, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, as well as the sole source of income for the majority of the permanent residents. However, industrial fishing techniques used by Canadian and international conglomerates, led to a depletion of the cod stock in the 20^th century. In 1992 the Government of Canada instituted a moratorium on the commercial fisheries. Over night, the primary means of subsistence was taken off the islanders’ tables. In an attempt to breath new life into a dwindling population, the wealthy entrepreneur originally form the island, Zita Cobb, established Shorefast Foundation a few years back, which founded Fogo Island Arts Corporation in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada.

The Arts Corp’s residency program open last year and is fully operational this one, with state-of-the-art studios in four locations across the island, created by Newfoundlander architect Todd Saunders. The Director, Icelandic Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir, explains in an introduction during my first days on the island that Shorefast also is financing the construction of a high-end hotel with its own cultural outlets, such as an art gallery, e-cinema and library. The hotel will open next summer and the goal is to attract a few wealthy clients to support the Arts Corp and community initiatives through their stay on the island. Using a combination of natural beauty and challenging culture as means of generate tourism is today an ever-so-popular approach by politicians and businessmen alike. As a user of one of the residencies studios, I felt both alienated and like an alienating force, questioning my position as tool for gentrification of the island, but without being able to do anything about it.

Utilizing art and artists as a tool for socio-economic transformation is not a foreign concept to the local residents. On the contrary, Fogo Island’s recent past can be described as a large-scale collective experiment where filmmaking was the catalyst for change. After centuries of British rule, bitter debate and a contested referendum led Newfoundland to join Canada in 1949. Although this freed fishermen from their financial obligations to the British Empire, many people who made their livelihood from the sea continued to live under precarious conditions. Through The Fogo Process in 1967, organized by Memorial University in St. John’s in Newfoundland, and the National Film Board of Canada, people from communities across Fogo Island were given video cameras with which to represent their plights. Resulting footage was circulated in neighboring communities and the government to facilitate reciprocal dialogue which would define the different communities’ common needs. The crowning achievement of The Fogo Process was the establishment of the Fogo Island Cooperative Society, a locally based and owned fish processing and export system. For the first time in the history of the island, the fishermen took the means of production into their own hands. For an isolated and forbidding place like Fogo Island, where most of the population didn’t get electricity until the 1960’s, paved roads until the 90’s, and high-speed Internet until 2007, this was a major achievement. The later is thanks to Shorefast and essential for any attempt to revitalize the island.

In The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction, art historian and critic Boris Groys argues that its “…today’s artists and intellectuals who are spending most of their time in transit—rushing from one exhibition to the next, from one project to another, from one lecture to the next, or from one local cultural context to another.”

Residencies in general and initiatives like The Land in particular have the ambition to offer an alternative ways of inhabiting the field of contemporary art. The Land, or The Rice Field in Thai, was established by Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija, in northern Thailand in the late 1990’s. Lertchaiprasert describes it as “…an open space, though with certain intentions towards community, towards discussions and towards experimentation in other fields of thoughts.” Both Fogo Island Arts Corp. and The Land share a desire to foster a remote space for creativity that is grounded in a specific context which strive to become economically and ecologically sustainable. That’s where the similarities end’s. The Arts Corp. strategically uses language the legacy of Fogo Process and Fisherman’s co-op but their methods and long-term goals are not evident. As one of the main employers on the island, Shorefast has become a much larger initiative that involves more people, time, and money than a few idealistic filmmakers from Montreal and St John’s. The stakes for the inhabitants of Fogo Island are also different today: it is no longer about taking over the means of production–they have to create new revenue streams for themselves. Change is not only inevitable but also necessary. The fish is gone and not coming back anytime soon.

The discussions during the conference in Helsinki, most of the discussions had a pragmatic angle. Most of the participants and the members of the audience were involved in residencies or cultural policy makers. After my experiences on Fogo Island, I have become concerned with what functions residencies serve? All to often art lends itself as a simple solution to a complex query. Fogo Island is just one of the more extreme cases. The proliferation of them over the last two decades has been unparalleled. However, how much of this development has to do whit providing for the needs of cultural workers? My perception is that we need to demand more from both the public and private that utilize us for their own cultural and economical gain. After all, without our content, they have nothing.

Lundh: I am intrigued by the way you situate your work art historically, explicitly referencing conceptual art and minimalism, and then undermine it by adding or subtracting something from what you started with. For example, Make Me See (2009), a white neon sign over which you have sprayed black paint: Conceptual art meets Abstract Expressionism.

Brüggemann: I don’t think of my work as nostalgic over any period or movement in art. I’m not interested in criticizing it either but in putting in a position where you can question it. There are lots of artists that quote and reference historical works and positions, but more than that I like to question it. Many conceptual artists, as we all know by now, had quite radical ambitions from outset, but soon it became a style.  Ironically, the “dematerialized art object” ultimately became just another form. The conditions and ideal of that generation of artists and mine is completely different, many of them were Marxist’s and anti-capitalist, and I don’t feel so close to that anymore. I think I have just accepted that capitalism rules the world and that there is no way out.

Lundh: Yes, but this is criticism almost as old as conceptual art itself: Lucy R. Lippard  writes in the 1973 post-script to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, that she feels like the radicalism of conceptual art is over. Institutional critique suffered a similar fate, as Andrea Fraser noted in her 2005 Artforum article From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique. However, if you perceive yourself as a critically minded person, which I think a lot of people in contemporary art do, it is a difficult balancing act between embracing and criticizing the system that feeds you.

Brüggemann: I see my work as dealing with existential questions. That, above and beyond it all, is what connects all the disparate parts. It is about humankind and our societies. Who are we? How we live in our Western societies today? And what are the possibilities and problems we create for ourselves and for others? I’m not offering solutions or suggesting new ways of living together, but making myself and others think about these questions.

Lundh: Asking questions but not offering solutions is a common approach for contemporary artists. Nothing wrong with that, or? I find that some artists’ are keen to criticize others but not themselves. In order to be truly critical in a field such as art, I believe you need to question and sometimes even undermine your own position.

Brüggemann: I think my practice is critical. However, it always starts with the work itself and then it can expand from there. Its not trying to point fingers at other artists or works. Like an earthquake it has an epicenter but its impact can be far reaching. In recent years have been obsessed with mirrors. The mirror confronts you with your own image. However, the images have no depth, no reality. For example, I replaced all the glasses in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion with mirrors, turning this modernist, supposedly rational and transparent building into a self-reflecting entity.

Lundh: Lets talk about your new show at Parra & Romero, Text Pieces, Obliterated Mirrors & Tautological Paintings.

Brüggemann: Yes, I will present three types of works, like the title of the show: text pieces, mirrors, and paintings. There will be three text pieces made with black vinyl lettering. The first one spells out “Ideology is Over”, the second is an advertisement for Coca-Cola, and the third one, “No More Tears”. Connecting back to what we just spoke about, I will show a series of objects I call obliterated mirrors. They are mirrors which I, in an expressionist style, have partly covered with aluminum paint. You can only see part of yourself and part of the surroundings at any given time. For me, these mirrors are playing with the conscious, un-conscious, and self- conscious. That’s how I think society functions today, a state of partial consciousness and partial un-consciousness. The mirror paintings will go on top of the vinyl text, obfuscating parts of their messages.

Finally, there will be a series of paintings, which I have called tautological paintings. This is a new body of work that I have never shown before. Imagine a painting by On Kawara, with a small black text on a gray background: The text is very small, 10 points or so, spelling out the prize of the work. In total, there will be six paintings, exactly the same except for the price. One of them will be priced at $10,000 and another at $10,500. In some instances, the price of a painting will just be a few cents higher than another one. Since the stock market has turned out to be a risky investment, people with money invest it in art. The thing that interests me is the notion that people buy prices rather than works. I priced them in US Dollars, speculating that it wont be the dominant currency in the future. Similar to some buyers of art, I’m here speculating on their value by connecting them to a certain currency.

Lundh: You’re playing with the idea of what the safe investment is. There is a conceptual correlation between piece and value.

Brüggemann: Yes, in the primary market, the price is what is written on the painting. However, on the secondary market that connection will most likely be lost. I suspect that the differently priced but identical painting will eventually have quite different prices.

Lundh: There is an openness to the works you’ve just described which makes them interesting to me. Unlike the dates on On Kawara’s paintings, value is something that is in constant flux.

Brüggemann: I’m very fond of contradictions, and I sometimes think of my work as “conceptual pop”, juxtaposing intellectual inquiry with consumerist desire. By doing that, I think my work becomes harder to comprehend or categorize. One of the main reasons why I wanted to be an artist was the possibility of choosing what you want to do. This is a romantic idea of course – you’re always your own prisoner– but trying to escape from yourself, if ever so briefly, is something I strive to do. For someone who doesn’t know my practice, my solo shows might look like they feature works by many different artists.

Lundh: In a way, you are creating a group situation where you have something to react too. Some artists who often show in group contexts seems to have a hard time reacting to their own work rendering their solo presentations dull at best. In your case, you are doing it in order to generate creative contradictions, which can be productive to your practice.

Brüggemann: I have never though of it that way but it is true what you say: I constantly react and even defy my own work. This sometimes makes curators and dealers terrified since they don’t want to work with or represent an artist that has an unclear direction or incoherent style. I don’t understand this urge to have everything so digested. I think the interesting to be open to things for as long as possible without becoming a brat who wants one thing one day and another the next. Things get digested and definite when you die. Either by you or someone else.