It’s a Supalife
Colleen Becker
"Let’s have a supalife!" is inked in an outsized, old-timey font on Gabriele Zygor’s glittery pink business card. A fan of mottos, Zygor truly believes that, Supalife Kiosk, her gallery, collaborative workspace and storefront in Berlin’s trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, can improve our quality of living. Initially founded as Filesharing by six graphic media artists six years ago, the project began as a communal production area and discussion group for artists and designers. Every six to eight weeks, specialists in new media were invited to hold events during which artists shared knowledge about emerging technologies. These slowly expanded to include weekly electronic music shows, video short screenings and graphic design exhibitions. After five years, Zygor and her partners decided to convert the storefront area of their workspace into a gallery and to market some of the artwork created by, and through, Filesharing’s social network. Renamed Supalife, today the space reflects its hybrid Filesharing roots, representing an international roster of street artists like graffiti crews Berlin Undeads, CBS, and knH042; collaborative printmakers like Fleischerei and Nostylefuckers; illustrators Mateo and Micha Hurt; stencil artists, painters and screenprinters like Pisa73, Bongout, Gould, and Crashkid; and the political sticker artist Stromausfall. Since much of the work is political, some of it is illegal, and most of it originated through the underground scene, Supalife exists as something of an anomaly–as a related commercial enterprise, it markets and distributes subcultural ideals and countercultural statements as one-of-a-kind, hand-made commodities.
A key to the Supalife dilemma can be found within a second slogan, scrawled in red ink on a piece of ratty canvas, and pinned to the bottom of the wall near the entryway: the word "ART" inscribed over the phrase "@ktiv revolutionary t@ktix." An inheritor of the socially responsive mindset of modernist design cooperatives like the German Werkbund, Zygor’s curatorial choices reflect her training as a graphic designer–she responds to certain visual characteristics of street art as well as its capacity for communication. Unimpressed by artwork shown at official exhibitions like Berlin’s annual Art Forum, she prefers work that questions the status quo. She values graffiti not only for its graphic stylization of text, but also because it usually carries a message–sometimes self-reflexive and only interpretable by the initiated few, but often intended to be read and understood by a wider audience. Originally produced as an act of creative vandalism and with the intention of marking public space or repossessing private property, at Supalife graffiti is reformatted and sold as tagged clothing and accessories, documentary photo books or posters designed by crews like Berlin’s CBS.
For Zygor, good art performs a social function; unlike most high art, it engages with real life and can be worn, passed by on the street, or casually produced by the untrained. One such project was initiated by Looser of the CBS crew, who solicited a collection of images following no quality criteria for a "cookbook" containing drawings, graphics, useless recipes and silkscreens, in which he placed work by a nine year-old girl side-by-side with that of accomplished artists. Some of the objects at Supalife are whimsical, but others are informed by deeply held socio-political convictions. The print-making collaborative Nostylefuckers, for example, are represented by witty screenprinted vignettes, one of which depicts an anvil falling on the head of a distraught figure accompanied by the caption "Nostyle, nofriends." Operating almost as a tagline aligning the image with its makers, Nostyle, nofriends also points to the social significance of fashion. Similarly, paintings and screenprints on board by Crashkid use irony to critique the fashion industry and normative beauty ideals. Small works like Fuck Yoga (2005) imitate 80s retro t-shirt design even as they poke fun at flash-in-the-pan trends, while a larger painting, Being Pretty Ain’t Easy (2005), uses collage techniques to fuse heavily made-up, outsized heads to little-girl bodies in a demonstration of the inevitable, and joyless, trajectory from childhood to adult femininity. A more ambitious project, the artists’ travel diary Get Your Ass to Gdansk (2004), documents life on the wharf 25 years after the revolution in Solidarity. Led by former electrician turned democratic president Lech Walesa, the 1980 labor strikes were a harbinger to the collapse of the Soviet regime in Poland. Interviewing dockworkers, two Nostylefuckers questioned whether their lives showed greater improvement under a democratic form of government, and used a local workshop to produce prints that reflect their responses. All-inclusive with respect to format, materials and technique, the mélange of objects shown at Supalife seems overwhelming in its diversity. For Zygor, the commonality between works of art arises from content rooted in like-minded politics rather than through similarities in form.
Just as Supalife grew from the social connectivity of Filesharing, Zygor’s development as a curator was intuitive and unanticipated, but intentional. The network of artists that coalesced around Filesharing materialized out of a need–designers working in isolation at their computers looked to their colleagues for companionship as well as an exchange of knowledge. The type of communal production fostered through Filesharing’s, and now, Supalife’s workspace is reflected by Zygor’s curatorial choices. While artists from far-flung locales like San Francisco and Sweden regularly show work at Supalife, the space is focused on the Berlin underground scene. Regular events foster community-building just as much of the art on exhibit is produced in a collaborative way. CBS as a group, for instance, is comprised of artists who pool their talents to make anonymous public statements, but they also realize their ideas at a local printmaking cooperative called the Fleischerei. Design-world competitiveness usually dictates a strong sense of individual initiative, but Zygor hopes to ameliorate the alienating effects of market-based rivalry by fostering relationships between artists. In this way, she hopes to build a better life not only for herself and her group of friends, but to instigate greater social awareness through art.
