KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Alfa Birute & Bunny Vellocet

RAW

©Alfa Birute

Horror movies have always been a sanctuary for the deviants. The monsters that would scare the normative bourgeois society away and force the spectators to flinch, squeak and avert their gaze, were a source of inspiration for the outcasts. The extreme body transformations, the dark humour and the overexaggerated surreal and often very violent situations, would have a cathartic effect – the formation of a highly artificial, sometimes vengeful but always playful utopia – and help build underground communities with common aesthetic references.

During the modern era the themes of eroticism, cars and destruction have always been intertwined and explored through the horror genre. The war economies of the first two decades of the 20th century led to a mass production of automotives, which found its peak during and after WW2. The car is no longer a luxury accessory for the rich, but an accessible object of desire regardless of class. The “Volkswagen” (the “peoples car”) will become the main axis of the industrial ideology and will be linked to an absurd way of solidifying social status and obtaining total freedom.
Alfa Birute & Bunny Vellocet set the “car” in the centre of their narrative as the projection surface that signifies not the beginning – as many may argue – but more likely the beginning of the end of the anthropocene era. The futuristic dreams of immortality, the longing to transform the human body into an everlasting artefact, which would eventually be able to escape death.

“We want to create a cult, psychedelic horror trip, about the fragile ideology regarding the “human” condition and the power struggle between the fragility of the body and the industrial ideology of efficiency.”

Exhibition
24.05. – 16.06.2024
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
23.05.2024
7pm