The artist is present

My screen lights up in the dark. “Get some headspace,” a push notification from an app urges me. Tomorrow, maybe. I’m doing okay. I’m lying on the bed in my apartment, feeling a bit beside myself. The furniture and objects around me seem to speak to me. The longer I look at them, the more uncanny they become. Like my mind, they are containers that conceal something within. Patterns turn into landscapes. Form doesn’t follow function. More is more.

In Ralph Schuster’s apartment, the final exhibition in Cologne opens up an interior space that openly references private conversations. We want to consider the interior as a protected space where the familiar and the hidden meet—a starting point for an expansion of consciousness. (In contrast to the neo-Biedermeier home as a place of retreat into the private.) According to C. G. Jung’s theory of archetypes, the individual and the collective are intertwined in the unconscious. Even though neo-capitalism emerged in many ways from the ideas of the 1960s counterculture, it has ultimately elevated the individual to the highest value. It’s cold outside. “Get some headspace.”

- Text by Juliane Duft