Graduate Lukas Rehm receives the Rainer Wild Art Foundation's Fine Arts Award

HfG graduate Lukas Rehm receives his year's Emerging Arts Prize. The award ceremony will take place as part of its exhibition opening "Kill Screens: A Much More Elaborate and New Set of Toys" on Friday, November 22, 2019 at 7 p.m. in the studio space 45cbm at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

In his media installation, Lukas Rehm examines a gesture he conceives symbolic to an emotionalized present: gamers throwing their controllers into a monitor, and the screen breaks. On nine differently damaged screens Rehm pursues the relationships between musical avant-gardes, Early music and the soundtracks for video games, which are animated in a multi-channel composition in collaboration with the tenor singer Han Sol Choi.
Correlations between frustration, the promises of technological innovation as well as psychological behavioral studies are intertwined with current political phenomenons. “A Much More Elaborate and Attractive New Set of Toys” is a direct quote from the so called „Iowa-Study“ (1941), which aimed at examining the behavior of children whose favorite toys were temporarily removed. Lukas Rehm transferred the structure and statements of the trial into a virtual gaming environment and enriched it with observations on current political events. The children displayed frustration when their toys were withdrawn and showed characteristics of earlier stages in intellectual development – a dynamic apparent in the sudden destruction of gaming interfaces, but also in society and politics.