How does the meaning of signs and codes change when the context changes? The artist Jojo Gronostay poses this question at the end of his six-month residency at the MK&G. He combines photography with fashion and design, also using objects from the collection.

In a room that Jojo Gronostay sets up like a concept store with furniture by Dieter Rams, he displays clothing from his label DWMC (Dead White Men's Clothes). He buys second-hand clothing from the global North, “relabels” it and thus questions the excess of consumer societies and post-colonial power structures.

The name of the label DWMC goes back to the Ghanaian term “Obroni Wawu”, which can be translated as “clothes of dead white people”. When the first consignments of second-hand clothing from the global North arrived in Ghana as aid deliveries in the 1970s, the quality of the garments was so high that Ghanaians assumed that the previous owners must have died.

In the work “African Textile Scans”, Gronostay also asks about representation and appropriation: who speaks for whom and who defines the meaning of the textiles? A Vorarlberg textile company designs damask fabrics for the West African market and shapes local identity and fashion.  The artist scans the textiles with a hand scanner and transfers the scan to the medium of paper. A serially produced product becomes a unique artistic piece.

In his installation “Logo Lamps”, he uses designs of graphic signs from the 1920s from the collection and Fraktur fonts, which were heavily appropriated by National Socialism in the 1930s. Gronostay examines how typefaces and logos can be read differently over time and thus take on new meanings.

Jojo Gronostay (*1988) is the eighth MK&G resident as part of the Fonds für Junges Design and was invited by Esther Ruelfs, Head of the Photography and New Media Collection. The Residence is supported by the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen.