Exhibition catalogue, AGGROSCHAFT. Marc Jung & The Gang’ for the exhibition of the Erfurt artist Marc Jung together with Benedikt Braun, Till Lindemann, Moritz Schleime and Ulrike Theusner at the Kunsthalle Erfurt.

Even before his studies, Marc Jung was active in Erfurt’s subcultural scene as a graffiti artist with a spray can. Even today, the close interlocking of musical (hip-hop & rap) and visual modes of expression is typical for him. “I deliberately chose my studio on the grounds of the train port in Erfurt because it allowed me to stay closely connected to Erfurt’s music scene.”

The programme of the independent label “AggroBerlin” (2001-2009), from which rappers like Sido, Bushido and Fler later emerged, shaped him artistically. Jung prefers aggressive gestures, garish colours, harsh contrasts, the language of the street. Scandling and shouting instead of talking in a civilised manner. But the artist does not really cultivate the gangsta manner. Rather, he uses the aggressively presented, boundary-breaking style for political positioning, for the thematisation of increasingly radical social manners. On the critique of spirals of violence and authoritarian forms of exercising power. The title of the exhibition refers to this: “Aggroschaft” is a synonym for the tense social and political situation in Germany and the rest of the world. The title critically echoes the presence of the “Aggressive Leaders” who have established themselves globally and the artists who recall the darkest, totalitarian sides of the 20th century: whoever appears the most aggressive seems to win.

To this day, Marc Jung is closely networked with numerous creative people from the music and art scene in Germany. For the exhibition in Erfurt, he invited Benedikt Braun and Ulrike Theusner, two graduates of the Bauhaus University Weimar. Also the painter Moritz Schleime and the musician and Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann.

With them he shares not only similar artistic attitudes – such as the expressive intensification of artistic means, provocation as an effective aesthetic method for creating cognitive dissonance, for breaking up habits of seeing and thinking on the way to new insights – but also personal stories. Ulrike Theusner showed drawings and prints, Moritz Schleime oil painting, Benedikt Braun exhibited installations and Till Lindemann showed object art.