Occupy Vorraum!
A conversation with Michael Jäger (author and journalist, co-founder of the weekly newspaper der Freitag)
as part of the finissage for the current exhibition
Sunday, 22 February 2025, from 5 p.m.
Open from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
We invited Michael Jäger to a discussion based on his article on tech fascism and dark enlightenment (see appendix in German) published in the weekly newspaper der Freitag in December 2025. He is a political scientist, publicist and editor of der Freitag since its founding. We would like to talk to him about what interested us in the exhibition Vorraum by titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage) and Sim Oerthel. We see it as a “dance” between the three figures by Sim and the performers in Cathleen and Marcel’s Los Angeles film, all of whom are, in a sense, performing in political “antechambers” (Vorraum). They illustrate that there is continuity (and no contradiction) between the liberalism of the market economy and the fascism that is currently unfolding. In Sim Oerthel’s work, this dance is performed by deformed and reassembled body parts of mannequins. They are covered with batteries, bottle caps and fascist historical trash. In Cathleen and Marcell’s film, figures from a neoliberal cultural worker precariat “dance” and interact while clinging to the status quo in increasingly overheated global cities and war scenarios. These are choreographies that have something in common, which we could call both paralysis and unleashing… In our discussion, we would like to explore these developments and consider what emancipatory courses of action and practices are available to counter them.
Organised by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann.
Opening: 16 January 2026, from 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 17 January – 23 February 2026
Open by appointment: 0178 3298106 or mailto@after-the-butcher.de
Vorraum
The term ‘Vorraum’ (anteroom / pre-space / pre-political space) is now being used by political parties. It distinguishes between a society and its political actors. This distinction makes it possible to separate right-wing parties from their followers. In the pre-space, symptoms can be slandered as causes and turned into scapegoats, Nazi symbols can be shown, Horst Wessel songs can be sung, people can be threatened, or forums can be littered with rubbish. But if pre-space means a gradual change in social subjectivity, then the interior of a car on a sunny morning in Los Angeles could also be a pre-space, where people talk about the impossibility that everyone in the world can have a shower each day. From there, we would then have to begin to think of the ‚pre-space’ as an unbroken arc leading to the lipstick traces on the title pages, street slogans and war memorabilia.
titre provisoire, Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage show their film `A cold case of happiness´ (34 min), Sim Oerthel is showing three fragmentary figures that are related to each other.
Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage work from a research based approach in time-based media, with archives and text/image related. They collaborate as titre provisoire.
Sim Oerthel, born in Nuremberg in 1997, have been living in Vienna since 2020, where they study at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The exhibition is organised by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann.
