Trophäen/ Trophies

Trophäen/ Trophies is a collaborative performance by White Market, a performance label founded in 2009 by artists Claudia Kappenberg (London UK) and Dorothea Seror (Munich, Germany).WHITE MARKET was set up to investigate, through performance practice, the distribution of value within the art institution, exploring performance as merchandise, the body as material and gesture as form. Trophäen/ Trophies (Munich 2010/Darmstadt 2011) had initially been conceived for a small gallery space housed in the former gents toilets of a large international fruit market in the centre of Munich, Germany. Given the rituals of the location MW also open a market stall with the intention to mimic the procedures of the international trade, but instead of working with conventional mechandise it used discarded plush toys and made these into trophies that were sold as in an auction. This allowed different aspects of the market economy to bleed across, and fuse with, the making and performing of art. A second installment of Trophäen/ Trophies was commissioned by Vogelfrei 9 and took place in and around the hunting museum of Jagdschloss Kranichstein (Darmstadt, Germany) in 2011. In this context the intervention compared and contrasted the mechanisms of the industrial economy and the art market with the tradition of hunting.At the White Market stall visitors were invited to join a game, either playing darts aiming for stretched out skins of former plush toys or throwing rings over toy animal heads. A win would enable the visitor to select one of the collected toy animals and to hand it to the artists, who would sever the head and mount it on wooden slats and invite the prize winner to add his or her signature. Sets of trophies were taken into the castle and placed amongst the rows of antlers in the museum for the duration of the art exhibition.