Chris Korda invites us to a collective suicide

The US artist Chris Korda likes to see humanity extinct. Now the Cologne Art Association is showing her first exhibition in Germany.

For a few weeks now, there has been renewed talk of childbirth fatigue, this time it has allegedly affected the future Generation Z. There have been isolated calls for a childbirth strike on social media to protest against climate change - do the glue activists call themselves the Last Generation? In such debates, Chris Korda, musician, artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia, was referred to with a mild or even sarcastic smile. She has been promoting a change in climate and consciousness for more than 30 years: "Save the planet, kill yourself."

With such slogans about the limits of human growth, Chris Korda became a little famous and a little notorious in the 1990s. She preached to her congregation, which potentially consists of the entire human race, not to reproduce ("Make Love, not Babies"), aggressively promoted abortion and appeared as the high priestess of an alleged "suicide cult" on Jerry Springer's widely watched riot talk show.

For "I Like to Watch," Korda combined images of 9/11 with porn and sports broadcasts

Her most famous music video, "I Like to Watch," is also about perverse voyeurism, for which she cut images of 9/11 between snippets of porn and sports broadcasts. By the time the single of the same name was released, Korda had already deliberately ruined her reputation as a composer of complex ambient music: On the occasion of her 1999 album "Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong," she said that world wars were an ineffective way of saving the earth from humans and that the Holocaust was terrible, but in purely quantitative terms, nothing compared to the millions of animals that are killed every year for our meat consumption.

Does all this still seriously upset anyone today? Or maybe again? Valérie Knoll, who is now giving Chris Korda her first German solo exhibition at the Cologne Art Association, stresses that the Church of Euthanasia is voluntary; the church, which is officially approved in the USA, does not wish meat-eating people to go to hell. However, Korda does argue that we as humans should only feed on our own flesh. She rejects the idea of torturing and killing other species to preserve our species. There is a compelling logic and an obvious calculation behind this: given the choice between veganism and cannibalism, even beef enthusiasts would probably mutate into grass-eaters.

But is it art at all? As a long-term performance, it certainly is, especially since Korda's appearance on Jerry Springer definitely has Christoph Schlingensief-esque qualities. In the practice of her self-made religion, she also produces a lot of devotional items: T-shirts, dresses, banners, each with neo-biblical PR slogans, television recordings or wall-filling paintings of disorientated sperm wandering around. An Instagram story can be seen in Cologne as a series of 40 digital color photos. The story is told through shock and party images from the perspective of a rhyming infant: "It's my future on the line/While you bitches shop and dine/I didn't ask to be born/Into a disaster porn."

As an apostle of such rigorous morality, one might even be better off in the art world than in a sect - the former traditionally has a high tolerance for "outlandish" views and ideas. On the other hand, an exhibition like the one at the Kunstverein offers visitors a cheap escape: they consume the message as an aesthetic provocation and carry on as before.

Chris Korda also has a life outside of her church

After all, Chris Korda also has a life outside of her church. Valérie Knoll gives us insights into a "total work of art" made up of music, images and activism, which historically begins with early drawings from Korda's student days and ends with some self-portraits created with the help of artificial intelligence. Both seem downright staid in the context of the exhibition, even if Korda's AI borrowings from film and art history lead to quite nice results.

Her music videos and music films are more interesting. "Adagio for Color Fields" is based on an algorithm programmed by Korda that generates images and sounds in real time and varies them endlessly; sequences of sounds are said to be able to repeat themselves in several trillion years at the earliest. The result sounds like loungey ambient music and morphs through the color spectrum in search of meditative relaxation. All of this seems inconspicuous. Or is it the soundtrack to euthanasia?

Then "Potter Draw" would be the resuscitation. This music video also follows the ideal of casually merging images and sounds, but seems to come straight out of a DJ set. Cylindrical shapes flow through each other on the screen, always strictly in line with the musical dance floor beat. It's reminiscent of the Mickey Mousing in the early Disney films. And yet: If Chris Korda wanted to bore us to death, she didn't even come close to succeeding.

The original text in German is here.