-Til – For – Give - Dirty shorts and Salvation

How to give and receive without being snared by the treacherous wonder of the gift? The culture of giving is often presented to us as something holy. From religious texts to dubious festive season marketing, we are subconsciously reassured that to give is the most noble of actions. In his artistic practice Jan examines the concept of the gift and its related principle of reciprocity within the action of giving.

A gift is a form of communication defined by a counter gift, Bourdieu wrote, not equal to monetary economic exchange, but it is a social process. At best a gift is invisible glue connecting people and forming relations.  When you give you reach out for the other to accept, accepting creates a bond that can continue growth or break when the process stops. With this in mind he delves into often ignored psychological motives and power play between giver and receiver

– Til-For-GIVE Dirty Shorts and Salvation, is part of an ongoing project on how people in the western world deals with left-over and abandoned clothes. It started years ago with a focus on the interplay between Europe and Tanzania, an important destination for European secondhand clothing, where Jan eight years lived and worked. Now he concentrates on clothes he picked up from the streets of Berlin over the last months.

The exhibition will start with drawings from his #slowdrawingvsfastfashion series accompanied by a walk-in-clothes installation and related videos. He constructs a stage for the clothes, invites people to dress up to create a body of work that sets to provide dialogue between giver and receiver – introducing an ideal cyclical dynamic of being both giver and receiver in exchanging motion.