Julian-Jakob Kneer
BASTARDS (CAREGIVERS)

9 June — 29 July 2023

In BASTARDS (CAREGIVERS), Julian-Jakob Kneer presents monochrome printed silver mirrors with custom-made galvanized frames. Each one features a layered collage of three seemingly random movie posters. Through crossbreeding ready-made opposing narratives and by sifting through themes of morality and the foundational principles of the human psychology, Kneer’s “movie posters” become contemporary zeitgeist artifacts that confront our supposed socio-cultural binaries of right and wrong, art and pop, and sickness and health. Kneer breaks them down into their constituent parts, and releases them for recasting in a value-free queer space.

– NELE JACKSON

A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none. Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere. A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

– MARILYN MONROE

Nothing quite encourages as does one's first unpunished crime.

– Marquis de Sade, LES 120 JOURNÉES DE SODOME OU L'ÉCOLE DU LIBERTINAGE

Maybe it’s best to blur your eyes while looking at them, to unfocus yourself slightly. It’s an overload that occurs when known signifiers are blended; when you accidentally scroll down the page too quickly. Familiar characters become entry points to the dissolution of our preconscious dualisms beyond the restrictions of the bourgeois or clinical perspective.

La Grande Bouffe, Lolita, Trolls, crossbreeding and overload; through the cuteness and denied familiarity of the cast of characters, the works approach a “queerness” in the original intention of the word, as something strange, something freak, reorganizing the foundations of how the images and characters are perceived, released into a space in which morality doesn’t apply. The audience inevitably recasts the films in their own mind as they view the works. In this new queer world, Pinocchio’s innocence is savagely lost, The Beauty and the Beast gets redirected by David Lynch, and Bully replaces Twighlight as the new teenage sensation.

–PATRICK MCGRAW