Shopping malls have not only for decades been a central part of American consumerisms. They were also meeting places for youth. Complex entities in which social hierarchies, the rules of attraction, economic strength were defined. A mall was a place where you went to buy new sneakers or an ice cream, find your high school sweetheart or get beaten up. It is the American promise and purgatory, where people grow up and monsters are raving.
The immersive exhibition “The Mall of Anoymous” by fashion designer, musician, and artist Shayne Oliver is an ironic take on the traditional infrastructure of consumerism, its historical legacy and its decline (the contemporary malls are digital and alas there is no ice cream dripping on your new pair of sneakers). And it is showing Shayne Oliver’s joyful ability to juggle the conceptual and the mundane in a manner that does justice to both.
“The Mall of Anoymous” is a show of unprecedented complexity which will merge Shayne Oliver’s legacy and his future as a groundbreaking, era-defining designer with personal and more abstract matters. Technically speaking, the exhibition will mark the beginning of a new chapter in Oliver’s work and career.
Opening: 11th of August 2023
Exhibited from the until Tickets: 4–6€ (card payment only)
All pictures © Shayne Oliver
