Stadtbäder Spaßbäder
13.-15.JUNE.2024

Opening: 13.06.2024 at 6pm / Performances: 7pm moriaariava and ddylanbbakker (ghuzheng and guitar) 8pm Michael Laundry (Duration:20 min) Exhibition: 14. & 15.06. from 3pm to 7pm

Michael Laundry is a Norwegian artist based in Bergen, and curator of MLAG (Mikey Laundry Art Garden). Stadtbäder Spaßbäder is part of his research project concerned with water commons and art. The exhibition at Neon Kunst offers a rich diversity of materials and methods: textile paintings, lithographs, drawings, stone carvings, woodcarvings, video, sculptures and performance. Together they represent detritus that has been turned into art objects from found material during the artist´s cartographic exploration of strange places and encounters with life along the edge of the sea and poolscapes private and public.

The titular significance of the exhibition takes its name from examples of new patterns of consumption in the private sector that encourage the privatization of existing public services, namely swimming pools. Wolfgang Streeck argues that in the post-war period, almost every local community had a public pool. They were simple, even austere, but nevertheless well-used, due to the general belief that they were good for people’s health and that children had a duty to learn how to swim, both to build character and to be able to rescue others from drowning. However, with time more and more public pools closed. At the same time, the rise of fun baths or Spaßbäder began to take their place.

Laundry’s artistic practice focuses on neoliberalization and access to public waterscapes.

In 1951, marine biologist and environmental activist Rachel Carson addressed the significance of healthy ocean life systems and famously described the ´edge of the sea´ as a ´strange and beautiful place’, an ancient and hidden world that continues pulsing magically into the present. For Carson and Laundry, the edge of the sea, rivers and pools provide an elusive and indefinable boundary, known as the intertidal zone where earth, wind and water merge to form ecosystems, and space for sociopolitical speculation.

In a moment where coastal ecology faces collapse and accelerated privatization of public access to waterscapes challenges us, chance encounters with voices from the depths must be heard. For example, what does a chance meeting with Anthropologist Anna Tsing or Sociologist Wolfgang Streeck tell us about our precarious relationship with water in the Hydrocene? Laundry invites the public to attest to their reports and build rapport with a vast array of oceanic communities, as well as both human and non-human life along this fantastic voyage.


Curated by  David Braithwaite and Werner Beck


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