Buckle up and brace yourself! During the group exhibition Remote, the space of HFBK Boutique transforms into a monster truck arena — charged with thunderous engines, earth-shaking stunts, and the fiercest trucks ever. The artists convert remote-controlled vehicles into performative sculptures: not merely moving objects, but manifestations of artistic research and visual experimentation. They emerge within a collaboratively designed sand racetrack filled with obstacles and ramps — a cohesive aesthetic landscape of the exhibition.
The project serves as a critical examination of the car industry and the socio-cultural status of its product: car as a symbol of power, speed, progress, and control, historically tied to ideals of masculinity, success, and prestige. Shows with monster trucks echo this mythology in amplified form, staging exuberant spectacles that merge destruction and performance. Dust clouds, roaring engines, and gleaming bodies of steel stir the collective desire for chaos and wonder — a fascination that Remote redirects toward the question: what drives our visceral pleasure in the act of wrecking, smashing, and crashing?
To customize their RC trucks, artists assemble mundane objects — from cycling helmets and wellness gadgets to doll castles — transforming them into the gamified weapons of destruction. The gesture of transformation is carried out with irony — twisting the visual language of machinery through cultural references, humor, and grotesque exaggeration. Each of the vehicles in Remote acts as a portal into broader conversations around violence and spectacle, forming a choreography of relations by continuously interacting with each other: racing, colliding, and diverging around the racetrack.
Maximilian Glas presents a replica of Phineas Gage’s skull, accompanied by the iron bar that pierced it — now absurdly crowned with an Italian Brainrot character. The work becomes a darkly humorous metaphor for the cognitive scars left by digital overstimulation. Building on the tension between injury and imagination, Peter Lampe mutates a disney-esque tower into a piercing destructor, drifting between peacefully wholesome and perverted. With a slower pulse, Bianca Nadine Itte’s glossy black truck embeds screens showing fragmentary motions of massage and wellness devices. Extending the exploration of body and motion, Malin Dorn’s latex-covered wagon fuses flesh and machinery into a transgressive hybrid. Emiliano Gomez-Forte merges the forms of a cycling helmet and a medieval visor, uniting the aesthetics of sport, technology, and warfare to expose a shared logic of optimization — where precision and protection align with control. Finally, Insa Derk’s calibrated, gender-non-conforming unit – part nightlife diva, part engineered shell – stages a cybernetic presence of softness and torque in maintenance.
Together, the collective Hypercapitalists & Friends reframes the glossy promises of technology and beauty, revealing the monstrous, humorous, and deeply human forces beneath their surfaces. Impulse question: Why do we take such pleasure in watching destruction turned into spectacle?
Accompanying program:
- 24.11., 6 p.m., Artist Talk with the artists of Hypercapitalists Friends, moderated by Anna Bochkova
- 28.11., 6-7 p.m., Guided tour
- 29.11., 12 noon-4 p.m., Open Workshop
- 29.11., 4-5 p.m., Tea & Talk
- 5.12., 6-7 p.m., Guided tour
- 6.12., 12 noon-4 p.m., Open Workshop