PRICE (Mathias Ringgenberg) (Switzerland)
PRICE
is a fictional character – a pop-star, embodied by the Swiss artist Mathias Ringgenberg, currently in residence at U–jazdowski, who has been working on this project for the past several years. PRICE allows Ringgenberg to explore the mechanisms of mainstream pop music and experiment with musical and performative formats. PRICE is not only queer, but he queers art, questioning the boundaries between performance, theatre and popular music.
PRICE is a multidisciplinary performance artist working with live performance, music, video and installation. His work explores the emotional conditions of contemporary life, undertaking questions of identity and their effect in a disorientating age defined by globalization, neoliberalism and the increasingly central role of the Internet in shaping communication, emotions and world issues. Whilst adopting the language of contemporary mass culture from pop music, reality TV and social media platforms, PRICE seeks to explore the social impact and emotional fallout of the pervasive mediation of selfhood that defines the present generation. The concerns animating PRICE’s practice emanate from a form of speech directed at the Y Generation, a demographic that are internet-savvy and have a pluralistic cultural outlook, but which one can considers to be ‘homeless’, lacking a strong sense of historical consciousness and subjective agency. In his multidisciplinary performance practice PRICE develops a single body of work across a number of different media, genres and institutional settings.
