In addition to the billboard, Carsten Nolte is showing a corresponding wall installation at the exhibition “FAVORITEN III – new art from Munich” in the Kunstbau of the Lenbachhaus Munich. For the installation, the artist uses discarded protective covers for advertising displays that have lost their transparency in the sunlight of the hot summer of 2015, rendering them useless or, at best, recyclable. By stripping the objects of their former protective function and transforming them into objects and carriers of a message, Nolte revokes this apparent end state and interrupts the consumerist commodity cycle of the advertising industry. The damage to the material, made visible by the colour changes, is symbolic of the principle of planned obsolescence, in which the service life of products is already reduced during manufacture by predetermined breaking points in order to increase consumption.
The work presented at Kunstinsel also highlights the paradoxical dual role of the sun. On the one hand, the legibility of the advertising underneath depends on its light, but on the other hand, the same light ultimately has a damaging effect – it impairs the visibility of the advertising message.
Carsten Nolte, born in 1976 in Marsberg, lives and works in Munich.
