The exhibition reflects on our times of industrial processes and highly standardized technologies. Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen translate the automated production and trade – of living beings as well as of commercial products – into performative installations, provocative objects, and subtly aestheticized documentary films.

The film Kingyo Kingdom follows the stages through which Japanese goldfish function as objects. An amateur breeder walks through the house he designed and built for goldfish breeding. At a wholesale goldfish market, traders sort and pack the orders of the day, processing boxes of goldfish for shipping. In the annual national goldfish competition, professional breeders and judges discuss the design criteria of a winner fish, the ideal features and the core guidelines: a physique far removed from that of its carp ancestors.

In 75 Watt Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen designed a product to be made in China. The object’s only function is to choreograph a dance performed by the labourers manufacturing it. The title refers to a handbook for mechanical engineers claiming that “A labourer over the course of an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of about 75 watts.”

Pigeon d’Or consists of a series of interventions that bring together synthetic biologists and pigeon fanciers in pursuit of making pigeons defecate soap. Bacteria that can modify the metabolism of pigeons have been developed with the help of biochemist James Chappell. The BioBrick, the DNA code required for creating these bacteria, is freely accessible from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The visitor is invited to take away a print of this BioBrick in the exhibition.

At the press preview, the artists will give a personal tour of the exhibition followed by a talk with the exhibition’s curator Jens Hauser (in English). The opening includes a welcome by Stefan H. E. Kaufmann, chairman of the Schering Stiftung and managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and an introduction by Jens Hauser from the University of Copenhagen (both in German).