The current exhibition presents two different copies of the posters from the Stinking Dawn series – a peculiar advertisement for Gelatin’s film of the same title. The edition was released on the occasion of the collective’s 2019 exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, during which Gelatin shot the film in collaboration with artist Liam Gillick. Co-director and co-writer of the script for the film, which was presented this year at the 41st International Festival of Films of Art in Montreal, once represented Germany at the Venice Biennial and remains an internationally acclaimed filmmaker himself. ‘Pathetic snobs and entrepreneurs’ – Ali, Florian, Tobias, and Wolfgang, played by the gentlemen of Gelatin, in the film appear in costumes designed by the collective. According to the E-Flux website, Stinking Dawn is ‘a shocking, beautiful and darkly comic film that asks serious questions about how we can survive in a society that constantly turns us against ourselves.’ Gelatin have placed their protagonists in a post-leftist capitalist dystopia. In the film, they attempt to save the foundations of their existence from the temptations and greed of contemporary neoliberalism. Among other things, the film’s script is based on the new edition of To Live and Think like Pigs – The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies (2014) by philosopher and mathematician Gilles Châtelet. Hence the motifs of capitalist ‘pigs’ and other neoliberal egomaniacs that recur in cartoon posters. The group expanded the whole with their own speculations on an alternative, collective lifestyle that Gelatin have been promoting with their art since around 2000. The starting point for the entire formally varied edition of Stinking Dawn is a clean, linear drawing in the form of an irregular grid on a white background. It serves as a helpful, modular board, allowing elements from life to collide or connect and thus produce new configurations that bring new qualities.

Courtesy the artist and Meyer Keiner Gallery, Wien