Sven Johne

Anomalies of the Early 21st Century

“Start every morning with a smile”, “I didn’t make this decision in order to be a hero”, “I’m merely a human, not a machine” – in his new, extensive cycle of text and images called Anomalies of the Early 21st Century / Some Case, Studies Sven Johne explores social dropouts – voluntarily, involuntarily, unknown, well-known and anonymous. The scope spreads from literally drop-outs that actually leave their society in order to live autarkic in the woods or elsewhere, to those that refuse to follow societies mainstream up to those that are forced to drop out, those that are completely unfree: the unemployed and homeless. Facing these reports are reports on the ‘happy few’ the winners of the neo-liberal all-around capitalization.

In his intermedial game, alternating between fiction, narration, and documentation, Johne approaches general and highly subjective themes of our time with humor and subversiveness: the question of self-optimization, specific fear of exclusion and failure, the search for individual fulfillment, and the promise of a better, fairer world. The background for this collection of laconic, documentary-like anomalies consists in the global market fundamentalism of the past 25 years, marking all those as sentimental, naive, or just as losers that have lost faith in it. The portraits are dedicated to those ‘fallen people’.