STEVE REINKE Butter

“My work wants me dead, I know. It is all it ever talks about,” writes Steve Reinke in a correspondence on the occasion of his exhibition at mumok. Death and life, empathy and cruelty, sex and intimacy—it’s the “big” questions the artist (born 1963 in Eganville, Canada; lives in Chicago, USA) is after in his work. In the best Nietzschean manner, however, Reinke considers human beings not political or moral entities but puppets of microbiotic agendas: Instead of the Freudian ego and id, it is bacteria, placentae, and plankton that rule the world in his videos; “culture” designates not humanistic achievement but life in a petri dish. In his first solo museum show, Reinke presents his new video An Arrow Pointing to a Hole as well as a selection of sinister text images and absentminded needlepoints, all of which, in a paradoxically precise manner, tell stories of loss of control, formlessness, and self-abandon.

Curated by Manuela Ammer