The relationship between the work of art and the image is a contested one. Both are only reluctantly able to shed the sticky myth of authenticity or originality, despite insurmountable evidence to the contrary. The work of art is perceived as a unique object, a physical manifestation of the Artist’s unified self. The image seems to promise an accessible, and replicable, reality, whilst, in fact, bringing us further away from than closer to it. Authenticity is a growing obsession of our contemporary, digitally mediated, culture that allays anxieties and doubts about society, politics, and selfhood. The heterogeneous art works gathered in CTRL V excavate myriad sources both on- and offline, and remediate, transfer, reconfigure, manipulate, and interrupt visual information in order to divulge what lies beneath or behind the representational surface. By rendering the relationship between the art object, its materiality and its subjects unstable, they create dynamic situations rather than locking signifier to signified. In doing so, they bring to light the infrastructures that enable their circulation, and recalibrate the economic value systems of seen and unseen within the rapid networks of contemporary culture, economics, and politics. Using differing pictorial approaches Julien Bismuth, Tatjana Danneberger, Sophie Gogl, Simon Lehner and Florian Meisenberg each absorb and arrest streams of signs – colored by ideological systems and the artist’s own subjective perception – to test out and explore the production of subjectivity, meaning, and the power that lies within an image. Sam Ekwurtzel, Katja Mater, and Danneberger respectively stretch, and cut through time using meta-material translations and perceptual experimentations to reveal what lies unnoticed by the human eye. The CATPC directly engages with the economic value of authenticity, creating works that are sold to buy back land owned by a foreign company – an action that reveals both the largely ignored consequences of the global market, and the art object’s own agency within this structure. Each of the artists in the exhibition question the way that perception, subjectivity, and the notion of the genuine piece of art are proliferated by often invisible forces shaping contemporary life.

- Franziska Sophie Wildförster