A Burnt-Out Case?

Sat, 1.9. – Sun, 14.10.12 Type: Exhibition, Symposium

Location(s):

NGBK, Oranienstraße 25

Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstraße 33

Artists

Ulf Aminde / Anders Smebye, Franziska Angermann, Gesa Glück, Kaoru Hirano, Henry Kleine, Julia Lazarus, Thomas Mader, Karin Michalski, Sabrina Schieke, Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage, Linda Weiss

Project group

Andrea Hense, Annika Niemann, Nadin Reschke, Sabine Richter , Karen Weinert

Burnout is increasingly becoming a diagnosis of our achievement-oriented society, for it provides evidence of the willingness to do the utmost and enable what appears to be unworkable, to exceed limits and surpass oneself. The exhibition project “A Burnt-Out Case?” seeks to cast a different view to the phenomenon of burnout that goes beyond the popular, often pseudo-therapeutic discourse.

In an open call, artists, activists and interdisciplinary study groups were invited to present complex views of the phenomenon of burnout. What the selected works have in common is that they refuse to provide clear findings or solutions. Instead, the exhibition and the supporting programme offer questions, reflections and visions. They provoke reconsidering burnout as a contemporary phenomenon. The artistic examinations of the theme raise question regarding the interrelations with the social structures and mechanisms of our labour society, for example. What alternative models of work and action can be used to confront the current dynamic? How can one evade the present-day appropriations, media fixations and the discourse on victims?

The project group of the NGBK that conceived and realized “A Burnt-Out Case?” calls for a new and reflected way of dealing with the theme that does not stop with “faster-higher-farther”. A special focus is on the perspective of artists and creatives who often work and live in a precarious environment and are simultaneously considered the precursors of flexibilized and deregulated worlds of work.

A compilation of texts dealing with the topic is available in the exhibition.

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