back to the overview I deutschsprachige Version des Textes In Samuel Henne’s work, the object of the American “Thank you” plastic bag becomes the motifs’ focal point. Henne adapts the shopping bag and transforms it into a carrier of information and images. In the motifs, which are laid out like mind maps, the texts and images refer to different semantic levels. For example, a note pinned to the bag refers to the receipt usually attached to a food delivery. The phrase “tomorrow will be better”, which can be read on the receipt, is repeated and in the repetition turns into a negative self-invocation, towards a “be better, be better” and “will” and “be”. The small-print text at the bottom of the bag quotes a science fiction film in which a mother laments the failure of the American dream. The empty bottles and cans inside the bags can be read as a reference to the practice of collecting deposit bottles in public spaces and to the social inequality it reveals. Collecting bottles in Germany has become a synonym for precarious working conditions, for poverty in old age and for wage labour that is not sufficient to finance the cost of living. The upper black and white image on the left side of the bag shows, as a picture-in-picture, an installation by the artist Bas Jan Ader. His works are about falling, failing and tipping moments that change everything. For example, in his installation “Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks”, Bas Jan Ader shows how large cement bricks hang threateningly over various objects, such as a flower, a photograph or a string of lights. Another work by Bas, entitled “Broken Fall”, shows photographs of the artist threatening to topple over to the right. The photograph on the lower left shows the book cover of George Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi from 1978, as well as quotes from Samuel Beckett’s “Worstward Ho” and the pop song “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will be)” on slips of paper from fortune cookies. Perec’s novel describes a house, its rooms and the stories of its inhabitants, their interconnections and actions, and finally the failure of a long-term artistic project. Henne’s image staging also appears to refer to the phenomenon of precarity chic, an appropriation in the fashion world that repeatedly causes a stir. Here, for example, Aldi bags or the Balenciaga trash bag are used as templates for a bag design and then sold at a very high price. This kind of appropriation obviously plays on an out-of-sync relationship of exploitation. Precarity chic lives from the potency of being able to pay a high price for a trashy aesthetic of real poverty and inequality. The staged object of the shopping bag, which otherwise promises happiness and fulfilment in the consumer world, becomes in Henne’s work a metaphor for an imminent fall and for social failure within capitalist valences. With the effects of capitalism alluded to in the images, social inequality is given a picture: an inequality that is profoundly undemocratic. Text: Dr. Silke Förschler Photo: Samuel Henne Photo: Samuel Henne Photo: Samuel Henne
