About

In April 2025, Andrea Huyoff received an invitation from Anna Chkolnikova to collaborate on a series of exhibitions in her former shop/studio, which was increasingly being used as a pop-up store. The concept for the exhibition series SH()P emerged from their dialogue. This cultural intervention intends to explore a gap within a row of shops using artistic means.

« Architectonic structures such as the Arcades/Passagen owed themselves to the industrial order of production and served it, at the same time also contained within them something unfulfilled, unfulfillable within capitalism. Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep/ Traumschlaf came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces.»

(K i a, 8) Benjamin Passagen/Arcades,Convolute K1a,8;English ed.p.391.

People can still instinctively enter a shop. They know they have the right to do so. This instinct forms the basis for establishing contact with the audience of the SH( )P project.

Economised culture is described as a culture of Materialism (Marx).

SH( )P follows the new materialist movement and aligns itself with new thought processes. When goods are circulated virtually on the consumer side and cardboard boxes are the only physical manifestation of things between the place of production and the consumer, what happens to public space? What will become of those places where buildings once opened at human eye level and where objects were displayed in arcades and shopfronts? The shop or store is already an outdated form, a manifestation of capitalist culture that is worth preserving. The sale of goods is increasingly taking place in an immaterial world. In online shops, everything is available to buy, and some even predict the death of the physical store.

The participating artists are distinguished by their research-based practice and process-oriented, experimental approach to art. They do not create products for their own sake, but enrich them with multilayered information and embed them within broad contextual frameworks.

This results in a complex body of work that can be exposed to a given situation, thereby enabling the kind of ‘shock-like montage’* (Adorno) that Benjamin describes.

Capitalist culture influences the production and contextualisation of art. In a «shock-like montage», as Adorno described Benjamin’s method in The Arcades Project, the shop and exhibition spaces coexist, highlighting contradictions. Starting from the concept of the ready-made — an industrially produced object transformed into art — and the ideas linking mass production and art that originated in Andy Warhol’s Factory, this trajectory can be extended from the site of industrial production to SH( )P, the final iconic stage before a product is consumed.

«They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.»

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books 2014.

Adorno described Benjamin’s montage technique in The Arcades Project («On Walter Benjamin,») as a «shock-like montage.» It brings the contradictions inherent in things to light and thereby reveals the dark side of all that glitters with splendor.

The space on Kastanienallee, a traditional shopping street in Berlin, provides an opportunity for various producers to showcase and sell their products. Chkolnikova and Huyoff bridge the gap between these offerings. Between the pop-up presentations of diverse objects, another kind of space opens up. Their exhibition project, SH( )P, deliberately focuses on this space — and on the opportunity it offers to address the exhibition situation itself. In the interim vacancy of a store that is temporarily empty, they are curating ten exhibitions, each featuring an individual artistic position that engages with existence in this no man’s land.

“Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”

Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Post-capitalist animism means that although the socioeconomic exploitative function of fetishism … will supposedly disappear with the overcoming of capitalism, fetishism as an active social force inherent in objects will remain. Indeed it must not disappear, for it is the animate quality of things in post-capitalist society … that ensures what young Marx envisaged as the humanization of the world.”

Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 99

“Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations.

[...] This makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.”

David Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination