KioskShop Berlin
Tina Kesting
KioskShop Berlin.
Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Ariel laundry detergent, Coca Cola soda, candy bars and newspapers–we are entering a space where you can get any product you may need. But why are all the cartons, packages, cans and magazines covered in a thin layer of transparent beeswax?
The permanent installation KioskShop Berlin takes the form of a typical neighborhood shop, reminiscent of New York delis, revealing a great palette of "product sculptures." Like a regular store, all the goods are presented in a compositional format, the brightly colored products filed up along the shelf. Yet, all objects are dunked into white bleached wax and illuminated by a bright light that, along with the white store furniture, makes KioskShop feel very clinical and cold. Visitors react with curiosity and scepticism to this new and different experimental sphere.
The room installation is created as a progressing artwork. The variety of goods is updated with new pieces from time to time, and will never be complete. As is the case in "normal" stores, the proprietor offers new products to fit the consumer’s wishes. Yet, in contrast to grocery shops, products at KioskShop Berlin don’t have an expiration date. They can be endlessly consumed–only visually or materialistically–because art works are eternal.
"Interventions," an exhibition series at KioskShop Berlin, challenges artists to install their artworks in an already dominated and predetermined context. The added objects generate a dialogue with the existing repertoire of furniture and goods. As time goes by, more and more sculptural objects are installed, which challenges the interventionists with decreasing exhibition space.
H.N. Semjon, KioskShop owner and artist, underlines the relationship between the art world and the consumer world with his "ready-made" art projects, consisting of consumer goods dunked into a transparent wax veil. The artist provokes his clients to reflect on the consumption-orientated art world. His installation shows how deeply art has become an economic and globalized factor. Like retail goods in grocery stores, artworks have transformed into goods that are created according to a client’s wishes and needs, or the current trends in the industry. By giving his sculptural products the same surface color and semi-transparent coating, Semjon points out that each sculpture has lost its individual meaning, ending up as good as any other. Once the product logo vanishes, each sculpture differs only in its form, size and weight.
Besides his headquarters at KioskShop, Semjon has already created mobile constructions as an extension of his idea, which have already been exhibited at different spaces and art fairs. KioskShop Berlin can be seen as a mediator and ambassador for German contemporary art. And Semjon hopes to establish an international aesthetic network, globalizing its own economic system.
