1. Emergency Lift Bar
Daniel Shanken, Emma van der Put
10 March to 2 April
Moltkestr 81, Cologne
Images / Text
'Big money, no whammies.'
If menaced by a shark, the best thing is to punch it directly in the eye, as prevailing wisdom claims that their optical safeguards are poorly equipped to defend against human hands. Should contact be successful, you can assume a 20 percent chance of survival, given a control scenario (this excludes, for example, your proximity and access to shore). If the encounter is outside the tropics (23.472 N or S as of February 2016), the rate increases 15 to 20 points in your favor. However, it must be stated that sharks are confused by humans and rarely attack with intent to consume – it’s their first contact with an alien life form. Typically, they take a curious bite (often from a lower extremity) and immediately swim to a safe perimeter, pondering their discovery.
Every relation, predatory or otherwise, generates its own degree of bias and marks a larger community that necessarily cannot be represented through a single instance. It’s probable that individualism is always tyrannical against society.
When considering this, I recalled a long-forgotten childhood anxiety: I could not distinguish a difference between historical documentation and dramatic re-enactments. Watching after-school cable reruns of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’, I couldn’t figure out why Robert Stack, the actor and host, had high-quality cinematic footage of supposedly missing people. His appearance in other films and television was additionally confusing. Who gave him the authority to wear a trench coat and instruct us to search for the lost? Why wasn’t he out looking, himself?
Emma van der Put was born 1988 in the Netherlands and works in Brussels. She is a former resident at WIELS, Brussels, and De Ateliers, Amsterdam.
Daniel Shanken was born in Los Angeles and now works in London. He studied at Art Center College, Los Angeles, and Goldsmiths College, London.