Text by Anika Meyer

I love McDonald’s. That's not a sentence to make friends with. Not in Berlin. And not in New York, where I am right now. In New York I was told at length that the quality of the food was not that good at McDonald’s. In order not to prolong the conversation any further, I nodded understandingly. Of course I don't go to McDonald’s because of the good quality of the food. McDonald’s is childhood and memories: Sundays with family and nights out with friends, happy meals and cheeseburgers, sticky food and ice-cold drinks. Everything was fine back then – at least our own little world.

A lot has happened since then. We don’t eat unhealthy burgers at McDonalds, but healthy burgers at ... – insert the name of the vegan burger restaurant of your choice. McDonald's might fall under pop culture, but pop culture isn't what it used to be either. There is no longer the band that everyone agrees or disagrees on that dominates the charts. The family no longer sits together in front of the television in the evening and watches a program interrupted by commercials. Spotify, Netflix, TikTok, everyone puts together their own program, looks into a device alone and lives as they see fit and important for themselves.

With his solo exhibition “Ad Memoriam”, Joachim Bosse is writing a postcard to the past and sending his best regards. With 6 monumental wall works, he is reminiscent of old cityscapes full of neon signs, symbols of capitalism: McDonald`s, Shell, Nestlé, Western Union, Deutsche Bank and Thyssen Krupp.

What remains if sales move on? What remains when everyone goes online? In Bosse’s work nothing glows, nothing flashes, no neon and no light. He calls his works between painting and sculpture, which appear to be crumbling, “capitalist cave paintings”. Are the neon signs dusty or dirty? Have the gray gentlemen from Michael Ende's novel "Momo" passed by? Have we been cheated of our time to save time and forget to live in the now? Where is now, when programs and conversations are running in parallel on smartphones, tablets and laptops and the attention is never quite there? Does the analogue world gather dust while the digital world flashes on the smartphone?

Bosse reminds us that we need to remember to find ways of togetherness in the post-digital world. Memories are beautiful, but they are also painful and sometimes healing. Like Bosse's works which evoke the feeling of nostalgia.

- Anika Meier

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