Artist Talk anlässlich der Ausstellung "Wert, Produktion und Wertproduktion"

In the organizer's words:

On the occasion of the exhibition "Value, Production and Value Production", Baustelle Schaustelle invites you to an artist talk with the artists Luis König and Ahmed Shukur.

At the beginning of every endeavor there is a question, not necessarily the question that initiated the endeavor, but a question. The question of this project was taken from an abstruse thought that had occupied large parts of our already quite preoccupied minds during the preparation of our last exhibition. We wanted to ask ourselves how the production path of every human object could be codified. In other words, what steps does every cultural body have to go through? This question, or this idea, grew into an image that we christened NKT (natural product, cultural body, techne). Now we wanted to put this child to work and had conceived of finding the full NKT route, i.e. every point in this chain, of a modern commodity. However, here we come up against a mathematical limitation that we cannot counteract: the principle of powers.

The fact that behind all products, goods and commodities in general there is an almost unmanageable number of highly technological and closely interlinked processes is hardly surprising as an abstract fact. But we could hardly deny that this magnitude is hidden in or behind the product, that the presentation of a concrete example will break the acceptance of this unimagined magnitude. What factors are at play when we move through the world whose breadth and size never catch our eye?

Value, production and value production are the three axes through which we have attempted to visualize and relate a connection between technical production, labour value and the national economy.