Give Love Back Again – Pop-up

In the organizer's words:

Ten years after the exhibition project of the Museum Angewandte Kunst Give Love Back. Ata Macias and Partners. An exhibition on the question of what applied art can be today, the participating curators Eva Linhart and Mahret Kupka, together with Sandra Doeller and Gabi Schirrmacher, take stock: the résumé of an exhibition success that has continued its triumphal march around the world to this day in the form of numerous plagiarisms of the posters designed by Sandra Doeller.

Give Love Back Again - Pop-up shows the entire spectrum of copies and adaptations by various actors: from the fashion industry to independent projects and their diverse application contexts - such as on socks, T-shirts, tattoos, mugs, protest posters or drinks vending machines. Sandra Doeller has collected many of these objects over the last ten years. Some were brought to her attention, others she discovered on the Internet or by chance on the streets of famous cities.

After ten years, these numerous adoptions and modifications of the poster and the idea of love as a principle of reciprocity are a good opportunity to question the significance and role of copyright in the context of creative achievements - especially in view of the increasing relevance of artificial intelligence in the relationship between original and copy.

In 2014/2015, Eva Linhart initiated the exhibition Give Love Back in order to question the meaning of applied art and to examine this art form more closely. She chose Ata Macias as the protagonist of the exhibition project - a key figure in Frankfurt's cultural scene who, with his work at the interface of DJ-ing, fashion and lifestyle, has shaped places such as Club Robert Johnson, Frankfurt's legendary first concept store Bergmans, Club Michel and numerous other hotspots in collaboration with artists such as Tobias Rehberger, Anne Imhof, Michael Riedel and Carsten Fock. The exhibition explored the relationship between art and life through his design strategies and social creativity.

As head of the Book Art and Graphics department, Eva Linhart asked her new colleague Mahret Kupka - curator of Fashion, Body and Performative Arts - who was appointed by Director Matthias Wagner K at the time, to collaborate with her. Together with Katharina Baumecker, they expanded the project to include a dialog with the artistic planner Gabi Schirrmacher and the graphic designer Sandra Doeller. Ata Macias and his activities between artistic strategies and life practice formed the center, which triggered an analysis process on the problems of applied art.

The project was extremely successful: 2,500 visitors came to the opening on September 12, 2014 alone and interest was enormous in the period that followed. However, the success of the exhibition was not limited to the subject matter and the love for Ata. Even though many people associate happy times with his person and paid tribute to them by visiting the exhibition, the posters designed by Sandra Doeller in particular, each consisting of a drawing by Graziano Capitta and a text by Matthias Wagner K, became ambassadors for the exhibition: applied art in the sense of Give Love Back advanced the theme into the world.

This reflects a central problem: due to their widespread distribution, the posters developed a life of their own - beyond authorized contexts. On the one hand, the numerous adaptations testify to the iconic power of the motifs, but at the same time also demonstrate the boundary between inspiration, appropriation and copyright infringement. In this way, the posters - beyond their creative success - also put their finger in the wound of applied art.

However, instead of claiming their right to authorship, the graphic designer and the artist confront the independent nature of the motifs in the spirit of Give Love Back and in keeping with Coco Chanel's motto: "If you want to be an original, you have to be prepared to be copied."