Galerie Thomas Schulte is pleased to present in the gallery’s Corner Space Everything is Going to be OK, an installation by US-American conceptual artist Allan McCollum as part of his special charity project in collaboration with the gallery. 

In these special times, we have thought of a project together with the artist Allan McCollum, from which you may receive a little consolation and at the same time support two international institutions, namely the ICA Miami and the C/O Berlin Foundation. From his image archive An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs with Reassuring Subtitles with currently 1.200 screenshots from American TV series and movies with subtitles such as “It will be ok” or “Don’t worry, Babe,” McCollum has chosen 400 motifs to be printed on canvas, each framed simply in black wood and measuring 26.3 x 43.8 x 4 cm (10.4 x 17.2 x 1.6 in). Each of these original prints is available for the net price of EUR 700 and can be purchased directly in the gallery’s new online shop. 30% of the proceeds will benefit C/O Berlin Foundation and the ICA Miami. The latter currently hosts—although for the foreseeable future behind closed doors—a major retrospective of McCollum’s work.

Allan McCollum began his collection of screenshots in 2015 as a visual essay about the meaning of closeness and comfort in our society. He wants his project to serve as a reminder that it is through the telling and sharing of stories that we perceive the world. It is also a critique of Hollywood and populist rhetoric which both instrumentalize our emotions by promoting the narrative of a hero coming to the rescue, while in reality we depend on being part of a community of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. All the screen shots from films and movies amassed by McCollum depict people in situations of great uncertainty and distress being comforted with words of support that spell out in the subtitles. But while anxiety and worry are feelings that are individually and subjectively felt and experienced by all of us, the encouraging phrases, which are frequently used in the films, through endless repetition soon become meaningless and a social stereotype.

Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944, is an internationally acclaimed conceptual artist whose career began in the late 1960s. For most of us he is known as the creator of important work groups such as Over Ten Thousand Individual Works, Plaster Surrogates, Perfect Vehicles and The Shapes Project, which can be found in many museum collections, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco MoMA, Centre Pompidou and various others around the world. Questions of identity and the relationship between the individual and mass culture are at the heart of many of McCollum’s works. He has, over the span of his career, carried out numerous projects involving individuals and craftsmen across towns and communities in the US, taking a special interest in common, everyday life, popular culture, the aspect of the individual and processes of mass production.

Everything is Going to be OK

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