Josephine Meckseper

Josephine Meckseper makes collages and installations that reconstruct the worlds of contemporary advertising and fashion in the context of the gallery, as a way of critiquing the political implications of the iconography of consumer culture.

In her display cases and photographs we see people and things re-objectified, symbolically removed from their original, all too familiar mediated contexts, and rearranged into self-consciously mirrored window dressing. ‘Yes, the mirror and chrome sculptures, glass-and-steel vitrines, and mirror slatwalls are not affirmations or glorifications of consumerism,’ Meckseper says. ‘Their shiny surfaces are meant as provocations for destruction. They are designed to be targets, like high-end shop windows being smashed during riots and protests. These works mimic retail aesthetics in order to activate the commercial zone into a political one.’

In Untitled (2005) a naked mannequin standing in front of a terrorist biography (which also appears in Selling Out, 2004) wears a hoodie and scarf, both menacing and politically charged items as well as emblems of ‘radical chic’. Issues around power, class, nationalism and gender are raised through the fetishised, cropped poses of underwear models and anthropomorphic props in Blow Up (Michelli) (2006) and Untitled (End Democracy) (2005).

Ubi Pedes Ibi.Patria (Where the feet are, there is the fatherland) (2006) provokes free-associative thoughts of sweatshop labour, bargain basement desperation, social homogeneity and images of shoe piles from the Holocaust. A witty take on cultural consumption, The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art (2005) is redolent with 1990s art allusions, while in Pyromaniac 2 (2003) lifestyle ideals merge with revolutionary violence in a female model on the brink of self-combustion.

Meckseper’s politically engaged works highlight ongoing problems of corporate corruption, status anxiety, social privilege and representations of women. They are also a chilling reminder of the excesses and distortions of capitalism, which has created a world in which, she would argue, there is no separation between materialism and political ideology: we are what we buy.