NARRATOR: 

The installation before you is at once an artwork, portrait studio, and gallery exhibition. Unlike most exhibited artworks, Jochen Gerz’s The Gift exposes the processes by which art is produced. It also gives some visitors the chance to take home art as a part of the project. Artist Jochen Gerz.  

JOCHEN GERZ:  

We invite people to come into the museum and to get their photograph taken by a young artist. And so every person who comes and participates gets a photograph done, a portrait of herself or himself. And since it’s called The Gift, there’s a kind of a underlying idea, that you will be receiving the photograph. And then there’s the magic of the artist taking the photograph. 

So you have, as a metaphor, the whole loop of what it means to— to be a model, what it means to be an artist, what it means to become a— a collector, what it means to know. So— like to be part of the world of art. And then in the end of the exhibition, there is— there’s a kind of moment that the pictures are rendered, are given back.  

But in a kind of a twist, in a kind of a turn-around, there is random that is replacing private property. So everybody gets a photograph of somebody, of a stranger, of somebody else. And he goes home with— with somebody else, with the other. The young person with old, or the old person with the Chinese, the Chinese with the black people, the black people with the – I don’t know what. So that’s— that is the idea of The Gift. It is a kind of a little story about a big society, which is very anonymous, to bring a little bit traceability back into the relationship between people.