Jonas Höschl

80 Portraits: 73 Männer, 7 Frauen, is a consists of a carousel slide projector, a device which recalls quaint nostalgic activities such as looking at vacation snaps. This one, however, runs through black-and-white photos, all depicting people in the same portrait format. Some of the poses are menacing, while the faces have been blurred out. The signifiers that these figures wear on their body—tattoos, shirts, logos, but also suits and folkloristic German apparel—betray their allegiance to far right groups. Höschl has sourced the images online, from anti-fascist networks where they have a clear purpose: mapping the Neonazi scene, documenting its protagonists, and potentially warning people who might fall victim to violent attacks. In the current setup, the pictures are lifted not only from their context, but also deprived of their function. They call to attention the mediated nature of photography: usually, photographer and subject are at considerable distance from each other, and only in rare cases the look is reciprocated, when the antifascists themselves are being photographed. – Philipp Hindahl

"Through which framing do we perceive images? How comprehensively is our perception of global events influenced by their media processing? Which contextualization comes closest to the actual events? Can there be reporting that objectively reflects this?"

Raising questions like these - posed by art historian and photography theorist Mira Anneli Naß - rather than presenting answers, is at the core of Jonas Höschl's artistic practice. Based on his media-reflexive work, the artist gathers in Politics of Media Images numerous theorists, artists and authors who deal with media-theoretical questions in our increasingly fragile present time. The contributions make our social inflammations and injuries painfully tangible under a burning glass.

"This criticism of journalistic reporting is repeated in his most recent work, And let my cry (2022): it is the transcript of an (internal) recording the Bavarian Broadcasting Company made during the setup and rehearsal for the memorial service for the victims of the racist attack in Munich’s Olympia shopping center in 2016. (...) False reports led to panic in the city, and despite the perpetrator’s unambiguous statements in chat forums, authorities long pointed to his psychiatric treatment as a motive for a supposed killing spree.", Mira Anneli Naß

On the 7th of November 1962, the then Governing Mayor Willy Brandt ceremoniously laid the foundation stone for the first construction phase of the large housing estate „Berlin-Gropiusstadt“ in the presence of Walter Gropius. Almost 30 years later, the documentary „Gropiusstadt - Ist alles Kacke hier! (1990) by Eberhard Weißbart appeared, which deals with gang wars in the satellite town. At a similar time interval, the artist Jonas Höschl is now reacting to the documentary, using the Film as the basis for his work. In collaboration with the audio film author Petra Schielke and the narrator Christian Bergmann, he created a sound piece with the use of audio description. A sound framework freed from narration, consisting of descriptions of the protagonists and locations of the short film, which interrogates the visual material itself. The producer Philipp Dittmar (Red On) reacts to this with sound documents of the 1960s from Neukölln`s museum archive, which accompanied the building process and the inauguration of Gropiusstadt. The result is a melodious radio play between German officialese, the subcultural sounds of Berlin at the time of reunification and contemporary, experimental electronics.

https://www.hoelzldaniel.com/aushang

"It confronts the history and contemporary implications of Neukölln's Gropiusstadt, one of West Berlin's major urban development projects from the cold war era. Höschl's contribution is a counter-narratological soundstream consisting of two elements: audio descriptions created to represent the protagonists and locations of the documentary "Gropiusstadt - Ist alles Kacke hier!" (1990) by Eberhard Weißbarth, as well as materials retrieved from audio archives dating to the 1960s documenting the building process and the inauguration of Gropiusstadt.", Mohammad Salemy

"He brings his own powerlessness into focus, addressing the journalistic routinization of news agencies and editorial offices in our digitalized world. The work was supported by the Alexander Tutsek Foundation and the Cultural Office of the City of Munich.", Kunstverein Baden (OE)

"Europe is lost (...) leaves an oppressive feeling. One photo shows a man whose face is completely masked, another wears dark sunglasses and smokes.", from the article "Nie wieder!" by Amelie Völker in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 05, 2020

"Nebenan nimmt Jonas Höschl auf die Olympiade 1972 Bezug. Der (...) Künstler (...) setzt sich in verschiedenen Medien mit den als "heiter" intendierten Spielen auseinander, die mit der Geiselnahme der israelischen Sportler und einem Blutbad mit elf ermordeten Geiseln, einem toten Polizisten und fünf toten Entführern endete.

Der Künstler verweist (...) auf Leni Riefenstahl, die das "Fest der Völker" 1936 unterm Hakenkreuz in Berlin filmisch heroisierte. Höschl macht aus Versatzstücken Anti-Propaganda.", aus dem Artikel "Bayerische Kunstförderpreise 2021" von Roberta De Righi in der Abendzeitung München vom 04. Februar 2022

"Manfred Weber (2019) consists of various samples from the commercials of 41 parties that contested the European elections in Germany in May 2019. The resulting mosaic of political diversity is dramatized musically; Falco's song "Europa" can be heard and the setting is based on Bavarian brass band music. Höschl examines the suggestive imagery of advertising agencies and makes clear how uniform the parties' self-representations are. The artist deconstructs the representations by breaking through the promising narratives with recordings of resistance and police violence.", HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark

Video-Production: Max Grünauer
Brass Music & Vocals: Philipp Lohmeier, Max Blechschmidt, Simon Kränkl
Lyrics: Falco, Thomas Rabitsch, Thomas Lang
Photography: Pilar Schacher

Jackie. Or: Dogs I saw…

I saw a trailer for a movie. A women touched the bottom part of her nose with two fingers. A dog reacted by raising his right paw.

I saw multiple covers of children's books with illustrations of a dog and a little boy. The colours were saturated and shiny.

I saw Konrad Adenauer with a dog in a photograph. The photographer explained during an interview, that the chancellor didn't want to be portrayed like this.

I saw an advertisement for a hoodie on Instagram. It showed a cartoon dog with a burning candle on its head.

I saw a prank video on YouTube. It was about a dog scaring pedestrians by being dressed up like a spider.

I saw a frozen dog in a garbage bin behind glass in an exhibition.

I read multiple times that the dog Jackie from the movie trailer must have really existed.

"The word “crisis” is made up of two characters in Chinese" (This video is the B-side of Jonas Höschl's exhibition which can be seen on @ck_offspace's Instagram page).

The state feels like an expanding vacuum, like a journey from Earth to the planet Trillaphon. There are no points of connection to this space, which seems more airless, nutrient-poor, unsubstantial, crowded. There are planets on which nights feel like merging black holes, while one senses the collision of exoplanets 10000 light years away.

Text by Hannah Gebauer
Artwork by Jonas Höschl
Curated by Christian Kölbl
Animation Design by Felix Neumann
Sound Production by Kalas Liebfried

"Ein Lied für Deutschland - das ist der Titel einer Ausstellung im Kunstmuseum Heidenheim. Der Klangteppich dazu, teils mit Rhythmen rechtsgerichteter Demonstrationen, klingt bedrohlich. Der erste Impuls ist, sich umdrehen und weggehen. Trotzdem ist es sinnvoll, dazubleiben, eine gute halbe Stunde Zeit mitzubringen und einzutauchen in die Welt derjenigen, die nicht an die mögliche Gefahr durch Corona glauben, aber an die Schädlichkeit von Atemschutz-Masken  und an einen weltweiten Plan der Politiker, die Wirtschaft zu zerstören.", aus dem Artikel "Wie Corona-Verschwörungsmythen entstehen" von Martin Miecznik in SWR Aktuell vom 25. März 2022

Audio production and arrangement by Kalas Liebfried, video by David Spatz & Lara Fritz