Human Work – New Art from Münster

Yedam Ann, Zauri Matikashvili, Jakob Schnetz and Rebecca Ramershoven, Jan Niklas Thape

The artists in this exhibition have engaged with what it means to be human in our era, an age shaped by humanity and technology. They explore experiences of time and space, repression and memory, privileges and disadvantages based on skin color and gender, dealing with illness, and old and new realities of work through photographs, videos, and installations. Tensions between visibility and invisibility, production and exhaustion, belonging and alienation are sounded out, revealing that our existence is defined by work and that this work is not an end in itself. Hierarchies and relationships go hand in hand with it: Who works for whom or what? Do computers work for us? Does our body work against us? Is the corporation our new family?

Yedam Ann focuses on how people experience mobility within architectural structures and urban environments, on power dynamics, and on questions of belonging. Her interest lies in the changing meaning of geographical place due to global telecommunication and transportation technology: The expansion of the spaces we can inhabit has led to a change in our sense of place; physical distance and geographical location are extending into the digital world. At KIT, the artist confronts us with these processes in her installation Hotel.hotel.net. The work presents a vision of the future in which supersonic aircraft radically shorten time and distance, allowing continents to be crossed in just 14 minutes. Here, hotels and airplanes are connected as standardized, soulless, and rapidly consumable environments. Building on this, Different Floors plays with the idea that human existence is no longer tied to a physical place, that it is erased when the place disappears. The installation raises questions about the value of life, which cannot be reduced to administrative data, and explores the ways in which individuals are defined by such systems.

Nichts Corporation is a fictional company presented as a website that connects Yedam Ann’s ongoing engagement with the concept of the non-place and its connection to identity, personalization, the contradictory loss of individuality, and datafication. In A Building with Revolving Door but Only Stairs, a revolving door functions as a portal that allows for a transition into another dimension. It serves as a metaphor for the differences between various cultures and social classes. Through the (immovable) panels of the revolving door, Ann projects a series of flickering lights, recorded on the U-Bahn (U2) in Berlin.

In his film work, Zauri Matikashvili uses as little technology as possible and takes on many tasks himself in order to create the greatest possible proximity to the people he films. At the same time, he questions his role as both performer and director. At KIT, he is showing two works in which he processes very personal experiences. At the entrance, we encounter You May Not Want To Be Here (2024–25), a video installation made of ceramic, porcelain, earth, metal, wood, and found objects. It shows Matikashvili’s intense, almost poetic engagement with a tumor in his body: “How did you grow so quickly? What nourished you? I didn’t see you coming. I wonder what you intend. Just moments ago, you weren’t there. Nothing but an idea, a code for another becoming. And now? So big, so fast, so wonderful. And strong—so, so strong!”

In the film installation Made in Europe (2023), Matikashvili accompanies his father, who for more than thirty years has repeatedly traveled from Georgia to Germany or the Netherlands to buy old vans. He packs them with our affluent society’s bulky waste, which he then drives back to Georgia, 4,800 kilometers alone through Central Europe. Matikashvili shows us a man who, for a modest profit, uncomplainingly endures hard physical labor, health strains, separation from his family, and the simplest of accommodations. For the son, who has long lived and worked as an artist in Germany, values have changed, while the father insists on traditional social obligations.

Kaskaden is a collaborative work by Jakob Schnetz and Rebecca Ramershoven. The work focuses on the entanglement of technology and aesthetic convention in photographic production, thereby questioning the content and status of the images. Under consistent conditions, three human models of different skin colors were photographed with a total of 37 digital devices, and the resulting raw data was processed into images using a total of 14 different RAW converters. The results, arranged in the chronological order of the experiment, show how differently the converters interpret photographic data. It follows that the results of digital image processing are by no means objective. Kaskaden also addresses the sociopolitical effects of technical decisions in signal processing, especially when it comes to the visibility of bodies and skin colors.

The images Speicherlandschaft I and II by Jakob Schnetz are screenshots of faulty loading processes of photographic images in an image processing program. The displayed data was interpreted differently due to an error induced by the artist, and the intended appearance was disrupted. Schnetz elevates the fleeting images created in this way to the status of independent new pictures, which, with their enigmatic forms, dynamic lines, and vibrant colors, are reminiscent of abstract landscapes. The glitch still refers to the original photographic data, but results in colorful grid shapes as well as traces of other photographs from the computer’s cache, which have accidentally become part of the image due to the technical error.

Relikte der Zukunft shows trash, mostly of artificial material, washed up on the beaches of Spitsbergen. Approximately 23,000 pieces with a total weight of 1,620 kilograms were collected by volunteers between 2016 and 2021 as part of a citizen science project by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Schnetz’s series was commissioned by the newspaper Die Zeit and comprises 100 images of various such relics.

The text-image diptych Mimic (After Jeff Wall) is based on a description of Jeff Wall’s 1982 photograph Mimic generated by a large language model (LLM). This text was then used to create an image with a diffusion model, which indirectly imitates Wall’s original work. Mimic, in turn, imitated a documentary photographic style, although the picture was a staged reconstruction of a personal observation.

Are documentaries objective? Are they truthful? The very decision of where a photographer or filmmaker places their camera, what light and lens they choose, is a subjective one and thus their shaping of reality. For years, Jan Niklas Thape has been investigating what he—and we—see and consider to be so-called reality. In Untitled (2025), he addresses the engagement with the unease of German memorial culture in the charged atmosphere of the current debate on antisemitism. He does this by re-contextualizing historical television footage in an attempt to find a way of dealing with contemporary footage that has not yet aged. We, the viewers, are drawn into the spaces of negotiation: Do we feel like passive observers of the past, or do we confront the uncomfortable images and words in the here and now? Thape’s installation at the end of KIT, crafted from lightweight wood, makes every word, every image of the four videos weigh all the more heavily. His responsibility in designing the work thus goes beyond the use of the images. Some of the chairs have no seats. We cannot rest on them, and can only perch on their edges and perhaps empathize with what it means not to be truly welcome.

Thape takes another step back, and thus behind the cameras of others, in his installation Speakers’ Corner (2025), a place in London’s Hyde Park where anyone has been allowed to speak since 1872: There, with his camera, he immersed himself in an atmosphere where one seems to almost dissolve, surrounded by the debates. Thape experienced the place, an icon of free speech, as being dominated by religious themes. As viewers, we experience the contrast between the genuine encounters that take place there and the production of images by semi-professional streamers, which are consumed on social media by a crowd that is not present.

Curators: Gertrud Peters and Johannes Raimann

The exhibition was initiated and supported by