Ding therefore Dong

An exhibition featuring works from the Robert Szabo Collection, curated by Sox Team Marlene Zoë Burz, Manuel Kirsch and Björn Streeck.

Thomas Bayrle, Anna Beil, Boxo, D*Face, Tracy Emin, Elmgreen & Dragset, Gilbert & George, Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Barbara Kruger, Meret Oppenheim, Piero Manzoni, Roland Mittelstaedt, Rotganzen, Michi Schneider, David Shrigley, VISO Project, Victor Vasarely, Roser Virandel

Ding therefore Dong is a word collage from Barbara Kruger's iconic artistic text work I Shop therefore I am from 1987 and David Shrigley's poetic sound piece Ding Dong (2006), created almost two decades later. The Dadaist axiom now gives its title to an exhibition in the small architectural space Haus 1, a former public toilet on Hallesches Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which raises questions about the context and independent existence of private art collections. 

The project is casually reminiscent of the cult-like veneration that has been accorded to (mostly male) private collectors since the 1990s, who, with their financial clout and decisiveness, have been collecting increasingly expensive objects that public museums could no longer afford in an unbridled art market. Money did not only generate social attention. The works, labelled as belonging to private investors, also seemed to take on a new meaning and were soon reintroduced into the museum world, with the owners confidently having their say. A causal oscillation that seems to inevitably describe that one cannot exist without the other? One is concrete, like an object-like thing, the other diffuse, like a cloudy dong? Thing, therefore dong. Dong follows from thing. Dingdong becomes the doorbell and cash register jingle of a capital market-based space of meaning. As if it had just been a toilet room.

But would there even be an alternative to this process of accumulation? Are artworks today kept alive by their involuntary neighbourhoods? Ding therefore Dong describes a pendulum swing from object to object, idea to information, invention to history. The parts reactively encounter each other and form new connections with varying degrees of stability. The project removes Robert Szabo's private collection from the intimacy of his private apartment. It creates an experimental arrangement of art objects to question the physical worldview, in which each work falls to the ground of meaning according to Newton's laws of gravity, and the accumulations of consumption promise a more stable self-confidence than the romantic evocation of critical reflection.

Overall, the concepts are rather nostalgic, but an ironic determinism continues to resonate through the uncertainty of self-confidence.

The exhibition is curated by the Sox Team in collaboration with Robert Szabo. Both partners share an enthusiasm for simple and low-threshold access to art. For years, Sox has been running a shop window on Berlin's Oranienstraße as an autonomous project space. In it, artists from very different socio-economic and corporate hierarchical backgrounds present site-specific projects and expose them to a random audience.

Ding therefore Dong is the second public presentation of the private Szabo collection.