Propaganda

Artists: Joshua Citarella, Ganslmeier&Zibelnik, Ben Grosser, Playfool, Oguz Sen 

Propaganda in the “post-truth” era is noisy, fast and emotional. Images, memes and codes create a sense of belonging and convey political convictions, often before these become recognisable. Communication strategies in online communities dominate political spheres and have heavily impacted the public debate.

Curated by the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the exhibition Propaganda – Flooding the Zone with Shit – It’s About Money, Stupid! examines how propaganda operates under these current conditions, how political convictions take shape and which economic interests influence their dissemination.

The seven invited artists have worked intensively on propaganda and online subcultures for years. They gained sharp insight into political affiliations, how emotions are mobilised and how power becomes embedded in technologies and everyday habits of seeing.

Joshua Citarella is one of the foremost chroniclers of so-called “extremely online” culture. For years, he has been investigating how young people on Instagram, TikTok and 4chan can drift into radical niche ideologies through memes, irony and algorithms. His artistic practice includes Doomscroll, one of the most influential podcast channels featuring artists, content creators and thinkers of the New Left.

Ben Grosser exposes the manipulative power structures embedded in digital technologies. Redaction Poetry of Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto fills a whole exhibition space with blacked-out lines of content. By doing so, the rhetoric of Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor, becomes strikingly apparent. Grosser’s latest work, Lux Affirma – an AI language model – strips down the manipulative design of chatbots to the point of absurdity, until the praise of sympathy algorithms, and their manipulative design, becomes bare and visible.

Ganslmeier & Zibelnik investigate the growing infiltration of fascist codes into popular social media trends. Their large scale video work Repeat After Me premiers in the exhibition. It traces how people drift from self-improvement trends towards online spirituality and extreme hyper-individualism. Through their other work Bereitschaft, they address young men’s current desire to restore a masculinity they believe to be under threat. A political message of the New Right presents itself as seemingly apolitical: “become strong”, “take control”, “be a real man”.

Playfool presents [OP]erator, an interactive sculpture that serves both as a work of art and as a functioning bot farm. It allows visitors to experience how their post spreads within seconds, generating entire sequences of discussion through automated dissemination. Playfool transforms invisible systems into an aesthetic work of art that can be experienced through the senses in the exhibition space.

Oguz Sen created four site specific installations. One of them is Immer ist Jetzt ist Hier, a work that includes a walk-in cube. Its exterior walls are covered with layers of political pamphlets, combining them into new visual configurations through controlled tearing. Here, Sen investigates the changing aesthetics and symbols of right-wing propaganda in public spaces.

Developed in collaboration with the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ Jena) and the Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy” at the Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Darmstadt, the exhibition brings together artistic investigations and scholarly perspectives.

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