Donald Trump golfing next to the Titanic

Chris Korda is exhibiting in Germany for the first time at the Kölnischer Kunstverein and is also presenting her techno music

BY JAN STING

Motifs from the Titanic - sometimes on the high seas, sometimes wrecked at the bottom of the sea - hang next to Donald Trump playing golf - or next to Putin with a bare torso. The context of the digital images under the title “Overshoot” suggests a journey to catastrophe. The American artist Chris Korda quickly gets to the point in her text-image collages. Her imagery could be translated as “it’s almost too late anyway, so why bother with it for so long?”

In the exhibition “Artist's Con(tra)ception” - a play on words that can be interpreted as an artistic concept and artistic contraception - Korda is now celebrating their premiere at the Kölnischer Kunstverein with an institutional exhibition in Germany.

Their position is as clear as it is inexorable: overpopulation is a problem, and the development of human environmental destruction is irreversible.

Dream led to consequences

A dream underlies the one she had in 1992. In it, an extraterrestrial intelligence claimed to speak for humans in another dimension and warned of the collapse of planet Earth's ecosystem. Leaving the gene pool and adopting a vegan diet was the logical consequence for Korda back then. It is important to recognize the limits of growth and to advocate for the diversity of all species.

Valérie Knoll, director of the art association for almost a year, originally came across Korda in connection with techno music. In her exhibition she collaborated with the Academy of Arts of the World and the record store Kompakt. The records can be listened to via headphones on the ground floor. There are also the artistic covers that Korda designed himself.

“She is also a software developer for artists and musicians. She has also been showing art herself since 2016,” says Knoll. Korda's religious community “Church of Euthanasia”, founded in the early 1990s, is controversial, and its members have decided not to reproduce. “In the USA it is more difficult to found a party than a church,” says Knoll. Korda may have something of a priestess, but she doesn't exaggerate herself. And: “She adopts the language of those she attacks.”

The exhibition in the art association also shows the early work. Drawings and felt-tip pen images created in the early 1980s when Korda was studying music theory. Buildings look as if they were taken with a thermal imaging camera and even then a direction emerged that Korda consistently pursued.

Today most images appear on the screen and run in sync with the music. In the early self-portraits, Korda can be seen as a young man, looking uncertainly into the mirror of the student accommodation washroom. He began wearing women's clothing, participating in transgender parades and also taking photographs. The photographs, taken in the early 1990s, are in black and white and are exceptionally sharply observational portraits. The self-portraits processed with AI on the upper floor of the art association are very current.

Sometimes Korda slips into the role of the silent film actress Louise Brooks, can be seen as Venus by Botticelli or as a cyborg, a mixture of biological organism and machine.

Until July 14th. Tue to Sun, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Hahnenstr. 6.

Under the title “Overshoot,” Chris Korda shows image collages that unvarnishedly reveal humanity’s ecological overexploitation. Photo: Thomas Brill

In the record store

The Kölnischer Kunstverein invites you to a tour of the exhibition “Artist's Con(tra)ception” with Chris Korda on June 12th, 6 p.m. One day later, at 7:30 p.m., the artist is a guest at the Kompakt record store at Werderstrasse 15. Their records are also presented and discussed there. Both events are in English. (Jan)

The original text in German is here.