Christian Jankowski

Gio’ Marconi, Milan
Through November 20

Christian Jankowski came to the world’s attention with his piece Telemistica that was shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale. It showed a series of recordings taken from TV phone-ins broadcast on local Venetian networks, in which psychics and astrologers make predictions in response to questions posed by callers. In the clips, Jankowski quizzes them on the outcome of the Biennale.

In another work on show now in Milan, My Life as a Dove (1996), he calls on the magic powers of famous conjurer Wim Brando to turn himself into a dove.

The remaining works on display in this the artist’s first Italian solo show, however, employ irony and visual impact to consider the way in which commercialism has come to permeate every aspect of modern life. Even the artist-turned-dove is used as the subject of an advertising remake.

In the video installation Zoellner Singer, four monitors—positioned at the four corners of a cross intended to represent Switzerland—depict customs officers from Switzerland’s four neighboring countries singing their respective national anthems.

Commercial Landscape explores the relationship between a natural landscape’s true identity—in this case, that of the Sienese hills—and the stereotyped image of it proposed by advertising. On one side of the room, an enormous canvas-mounted photograph depicts the famous mill that features in the commercials for the Italian food company Mulino Bianco, being visited by thousands of faithful customers and devotees of the ads; on the other, a number of fake TV adverts, portraying a young couple running through fields, are projected onto a screen.

The images are accompanied by a debate regarding the defense of the “countryside’s representational rights” by its inhabitants—the “rightful owners” of this particular copyright.

With this ambivalent homage to Italy, the latest leg in Jankowski’s bizarre journey draws to a close—a journey which the German artist has for years now been tracing along the path that runs between so-called everyday reality and commercial fiction.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Rosalind Furness